


Diary of the Devil

by Tlon



Category: Hellblazer & Related Fandoms, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Apocalypse, Blasphemy for fun and profit, Christianity, F/M, Gender Issues, Human Experimentation, Hurt/Comfort, Matriarchy, Medical Torture, Misandry, Multiverse, New York, Oral Sex, Power Imbalance, Psychic Abilities, Religious Conflict, Science Fiction, Torture, Vaginal Sex, really really ooc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-09-26 18:29:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 23,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9915488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon
Summary: Manhattan is a quarantine zone. A block of downtown is ethereal and uninhabitable, and a peacekeeping force patrols the city, carefully watching the moves of cryptosensitives: people with the uncanny ability to read the feelings of the dead. One of these is John, an expatriate seeking answers to a mysterious message that catches him in a string of terrible events and cruel relationships with careless women. After escaping an experimentation facility beneath the surface of the Hudson, John begins to realize that the world he inhabits – where women are predators and men prey – is not the only one in existence. And soon, unless he trusts the word of a one-time accountant who claims to be the devil, it may not exist at all.





	1. The Bowling Green Massacre

**Author's Note:**

> Believe it or not, this was at one point a Hellblazer fic about Thatcherism. I'm leaving the fandom tag on, for old time's sake. And because this story's surnameless John is Trenchcoat-Brigade-as-filtered-through-a-reverse-gender-Handmaid's-Tale. (It makes more sense in context.) Otherwise, they may as well be completely unrelated.

_The cold man came to New York on midday at the end of a harsh summer. He appeared in the back of an Alphabet City bodega, where a skinny gray cat puffed her tail and hissed. The man stared at her. She fled._

_There were two women in the store, carelessly dressed. They watched him pass in the corner of their eyes. Their names were Tabby and Beth, and he'd known them in another life, where they wore carefully painted makeup and did their hair the way their boyfriends liked. (Until one day one wouldn't like it, and the knife would come – but that was still the future, irrelevant here). He glanced at them, sparing them the full force of his gaze. The real Tabby and Beth would have lowered their long-lashed eyes. They wouldn't have looked back with rebelliously bare faces, shrugging: what is it?_

_He only shook his head, walked out. The sky was bright and pale, and he slid round sunglasses down his perfectly sweatless face, fleece-lined jean jacket buttoned to the neck. He nodded at the peacekeeper who held her rifle tight and hissed obscenities at him, remembering a better world where he would have the power he deserved. No matter. It wouldn't be long._

_Behind him, a strut in the bodega ceiling slipped three inches with a puff of dust, the metal flickering like a broken television screen. No, it wouldn't be long. It wouldn't be long at all._

***

John awoke, staring at the words on his notepad and trying to hold onto dreams of London. A year after his last step outside Manhattan, he barely dreamed at all – when he slept now, he wrote, things he didn't understand and tried not to think about. Things from Bowling Green and the Pier, and other places that defied human geography, quotes from books and newspaper articles he'd never read. And now... now, he wasn't even sure what he was reading, this story about a man in the city scrawled in a hand not his own.

He had been cryptosensitive since nearly the beginning, when the first of them began to feel the sting of dead emotion on worn coins and in old houses three years ago. He'd been hooked by a strange psychic pull to New York soon after, and by then there had been nothing keeping him home. His orderly work at the hospital only called up other people's painful memories, and the woman he'd been seeing had made probing jokes that weren't quite jokes, and finally stopped calling at any time but late, drunken nights. He pulled together his last savings for a flight, not sure what he was expecting. Whatever it was, it hadn't been the emergency, or everything that followed.

Bowling Green had been a sinkhole officially at first, then an explosion, first infrastructural and then terrorist in cause. But neither could account for the fact that one could still see the tops of buildings that were supposed to have disappeared, flickering on the skyline from certain angles. That had been the real start of the emergency – not the disappearances, though they numbered in the thousands, but the complete ignorance as to their cause. And then, the suspicion, a tendril of fear that began constricting the city from without. He'd gone to the consulate as soon as he began to feel the lockdown click into place, waited in a crowded room between a pair of nervous men and a woman who might have been a statue for all he could tell. Well, that wasn't quite true – he could sense the ragged threads of loss like they were woven into her clothing, along with an unpleasant and unfamiliar humming.

The young men talked with each other quietly and intensely, and John let them be. The phones had gone a few days earlier, and even people who rarely spoke seemed to have a gap to fill. He focused on the humming around the woman. It grated like sandpaper on his skin, until he finally turned towards her, trying to look like another anxious expatriate who could sense the window for escape closing.

“Have you heard anything about flights?” he asked.

The woman shook her head. He continued.

“I keep thinking – I wish I'd had someone to come with me. Although then, who knows what they'd do with two of us to worry about...” He trailed off carefully. “What about you? Meeting people?”

The woman's head dipped, as if it were very heavy, and for a moment she looked like she might get up and leave. John waited.

“Not anymore,” she said finally, the words separated into telegraphic bursts. “He worked in – he worked on Whitehall. I tried to go there – find him, right after, before they closed it. But...”

That must be the hum, then. That rough, jittery feel was the echo of whatever had happened at Bowling Green. The psychic texture repelled him like a magnet turned the wrong way around. It repelled him, and he wanted to be closer. There was something almost painfully vital in it, and the woman had absorbed only a hint of its power.

A slamming door broke his concentration. The woman who entered had pinched worry lines above her eyebrows, but she spoke in the cool, even tone of someone who dismissed concerns for a living.

“You're not stuck here,” she loudly reassured the room. Her accent was American. Not an attache, then. He felt nothing from her – no loss or trauma had hit her hard enough to stick. “We just need to process everyone. I've got you all down here, I'll call when we're ready. Is there an Abigail Barnes?”

The woman next to him gave no acknowledgement other than standing. “Hope you get out safe,” she whispered to John as she walked away. “Disaster's no place for a man alone.”

John watched the gap where she had been, Bowling Green still clinging to it. It shouldn't have – he should barely be able to feel it at all, her connection to the event had been so weak. No one should be able to track a tragedy around secondhand like muddy footprints.

Maybe it was just the tension of the city getting to him. New York seemed very small now; some wing of American military had joined the police on street corners, and cars stood still on the high uptown bridges because they had run into roadblocks and been boxed in. The cable networks had been sheared, but on satellite news, the anchors talked about New Yorkers with a combination of pity and horror. John had never felt so foreign – it was best to leave all of it behind, before it was too late.

But the feeling persisted. Attractive, repellent. 

The calm woman called his name. Between the soft bulb lamps in the hallway outside, they'd tacked a sign on a door: RESTRICTED, it said, in bright printed letters. She opened the restricted door and held it for him.

“So what's this?”

The woman remained as unperturbed as ever, but her withering glare hit him immediately.

“I don't mean to be rude, but if there's a room in the consulate that's suddenly forbidden, and it's here for... processing... I'd like to know what that means,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “It's not dangerous. We're just... think of it like customs.”

“Airplane's behind the break room, then, is it?”

“Sit down.”

He could have fought, and maybe that would have mattered. But all he could think of was the walls, visible and metaphorical, that he could already feel circling Manhattan. They rippled like concentric circles from the tip of the island, where concrete barricades and blocked-off buffer streets could not conceal the half-real architecture of the Bowling Green Block. He watched the woman peel apart a strip of plasters and tear one open, exposing a steel nub where the pad should have been.

“This customs too?”

She ignored him. “You're not afraid of needles, are you? Because this barely is one. It'll just take – ”

He made a point of not flinching when she turned his hand over and plunged the metal into the heel of his palm.

The plasters' scummy layer of tragedy was more unpleasant than the needle itself. He got hints of pain when he bought clothing that had come too quickly from a sweatshop, but this was fresh and deliberate, like a recently dead thing against his skin. A dot of red grew under the thin beige rubber, until it had formed a neat circle in some hidden reservoir. It darkened beneath his eyes, and the woman's grip went loose, as if she had felt the dead thing too. He realized too late what it meant.

“You're sensitive,” she said.

He would have smiled and cracked a self-deprecating joke, but the look in her eyes spelled death. “You really think that thing works, whatever it is?” he said instead. “You'd have to be a senser to know that, wouldn't you? Or is it just a bit of snake oil security theater, because there aren't any planes? Because there's not any way --”

“Just one second,” the woman cut in. She didn't bother to take the plaster back.

He could have run, and maybe that would have mattered. But where would he have run to? New York didn't care about him either way. It was London that didn't want him back, and the godforsaken rest of America that wouldn't consider taking him in. The woman never returned, and all the consulate did was send him back into the unnervingly empty streets, where the only thing he could think to do was catch a train downtown.

The whole Lexington artery stopped at City Hall now, a safe handful of stations away from Bowling Green. He closed his eyes, letting it loop around the end of the track and carry him back up. When he came to, it had gone halfway up Manhattan. He had a torn envelope from the embassy folded between thumb and forefinger, and a pencil stub from one pocket in the other.

John had never produced automatic writing, although he knew people who did. It was an area women tended to monopolize, something more advanced than simple sensation-gathering. Yet here was verse, scratched on the back of the envelope.

> _And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat._
> 
> _Unto the man he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; and thy desire shall be to thy wife, and she shall rule over thee._
> 
> _And unto Eve he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return._

And then, in large block letters, an address – a number and street he would later locate on a map in the heart of the Bowling Green Block. Something was telling him to go there, and although he didn't know what he would find, it was enough to prod him into following the impulse he'd felt back in the waiting room. He'd spent long enough by then using his talents professionally – working out of one of the newly formed agencies, pulling the threads of lost items and dead family members and wayward spouses – to trust his instincts.

As he settled into the borough's quarantine, John gathered every story about each failed investigation and rescue – not for the results, but for hints at where Bowling Green was most inhabitable, where it was least guarded. Those who could move out of the city began to do so, leaving behind the poor, the aged, the faithful, the military, and the sensitive. The walls solidified, until leaving the island barely crossed John's mind. The only place he cared about was the barren space downtown, where the new division of guards stood nervously at measured intervals, looking back as if something might come out of the Block if they got too comfortable.

It had meant enduring months of surveillance and paranoia, but he had made it. He had struggled farther into the heart of the disaster zone than anyone must have since the rescue teams, all for a few minutes in front of a rolling and sputtering cement wall, with a revolving glass door that was both spinning and still.

He had never stopped paying for it.


	2. Wine Like Old Blood

_The cold man had always, quite rightly, had a sense of people. But these were not people, he thought, as he walked the crude wall of the Bowling Green memorial. They were a sad parody, like the woman ignoring him to one side, mouthing what he recognized as a prayer. She had dressed in a taupe skirt and sleeveless shirt, neither modest nor appealing – no virgin, no whore, she had nothing to offer._

_The woman looked up and saw him staring. She should have been frightened of him, a strange man. But she only shifted, slowly, and said “Did you lose someone?” The cold man had a sense of people, and he knew that this pathetic woman didn't fear him. She pitied him._

***

The peacekeeper was only a small part of John's payment. She had shipped all the way from Virginia for the emergency, and she bit hard and visited on Wednesday evenings. John had never asked her name; she hadn't volunteered it, not even the first time, when she called to him on the street as he walked home late from one of Jamie's jobs.

“Babe!” she had said, back then. “Hey baby, you look _good_.”

He had ignored her, pretending not to be acutely aware of the patches on her loose leather jacket, marking her even off-duty.

“Hey,” she repeated. “Hey!”

She grabbed his arm. American military could sense fear, even without his sort of sensitivity. He had learned that lesson well. And they didn't need to hear his accent to know he was a long ways from home.

He pulled away, throwing his arm at her when she tried to get closer. It was only reflex; he couldn't stand to have them near him, these days. It had been a mistake to get so close in the first place, and he'd only done it out of a sense of pride. He'd spent too much time hiding, hesitating before turning corners, always wondering if passers-by could feel the tarry pain of the Pier on him, and if one of them would realize what that meant – that he should still be stuck in a cement block beneath the surface of the water, waiting to be tested yet again.

Everything he did, these days – everything he did was a mistake. The soldier caught his wrist and pushed him against the wall, and he heard the pop of a hidden holster strap somewhere inside the jacket. Her breath warmed his neck as she whispered.

“You look _really_ good.”

She was too close. His body tensed despite his efforts; keeping himself from shaking was hard enough. The bones in his left foot, the one that had never quite healed right, ached. He was furious at himself for his weakness, and he'd made his third mistake to compensate – he tried to run. She still had his arm, so he only stumbled, and when he fell into the peacekeeper she laughed and swore to no one – fuck, he plays hard to get – in her blunt, ugly voice.

At least, he thought, he couldn't blame himself too much. Even if he hadn't come home after curfew, even if he had avoided empty streets, peacekeepers got what they wanted.

“Where do you live?” she asked as soon as she'd shoved him into the front seat of her car. He was breathing carefully, as slowly as he could manage. She wrapped her fingers around the back of his head, running them through his hair. Then she pulled hard enough to yank a few strands out. “Your house, sweetheart. I can take you home, make sure you're not in trouble. Or...” her fingers ran down to his neck “...we can be official. I've got plenty enough to log you.”

Even through the pain behind his eyes, he understood what he was being offered, and he wanted to refuse it. But even the chance of someone matching his new name with some old fingerprint or photograph was petrifying. He gave her directions to his flat.

She kept a hand on his wrist as she followed his instructions to the ugly white-brick prewar where Jamie had helped him lease a dingy flat – he'd still never have been able to afford it before Bowling Green and its exodus, although back then the building would have been repaired and lit more often. He barely felt the rancid summer heat as she searched through his pockets for a door key with one hand and rested the other loosely around his neck. She barely waited until they were inside to lock the door behind them and push him against the wall, popping open the buttons on his shirt. She stopped to slide her fingers down the smooth lines of his scars, and he was freezing again, skin clammy like the walls of the Pier. It wasn't real when she looked down the hall for his double bed and made him lay down on it, or when she finished undressing him and slid her hand between his thighs and he let his eyes focus just beyond her shoulder and tried to remember that this was the better of two choices. But he couldn't go too far down that line of thought, because if he did, he was back underwater.

Her teeth broke the skin of his neck and he shuddered. She was enjoying herself. She would make sure that he enjoyed himself. That was what they always said. _You'll like this._ He gasped as she swept her fingers upward. He couldn't think, now. Everything burned – with pleasure, with pain. It was someone else with her legs around him, someone he loved – no, he was in a cell and they had just told them what they were going to do – he was somewhere windowless and cold, and as soon as she was finished, she would put her gun to his temple and everything would be cold, forever.

But there was no gun. After, she slid her clothes back on and disappeared for a moment into the flat's narrow kitchen. John sat up and looked out the window, wondering with clinical detachment if he could make the three-story fall to the sidewalk. She was back before he could make a decision, carrying one of his flimsy glass tumblers. She took a sip and set it on the floor, too far away for him to reach it.

“You're sensitive, aren't you?” she asked, a wide-open drawl.

John froze. He started to shake his head, but she leaned close and spoke quietly into his ear. “Don't bullshit me.” She grabbed his hair and held him in place, looking at his shoulder. Her fingers traced the pitted place where the Pier tattoo should have been.

“Could have done it a little smoother, couldn't they?”

She would have to turn him in now, and it would be worse than before. They would fingerprint him and check his phony license and no one would let him go a second time.

The hand slid up his neck. “Don't go crazy on me,” she said. “Isn't like I've never seen a cut-job before. I can keep a secret. I will keep a secret. As long as it's...” she rubbed a thumb over his earlobe “...our secret.”

His calm lasted only until she had copied his address and false identification and he saw her walk down the steps outside. Before she was even gone, he was shaking, trying to strip the sheets from the bed but only getting them tangled. They swept over the glass and it splintered into the floor's cracks, so that for days after he felt sharp grains in the soles of his feet. He picked them out only when he was sure they wouldn't come free on their own – the pain of having to look at himself too closely was worse than the glass.

The peacekeeper could have had any number of men for the promise of money or imported liquor or any of the other things that John had stopped caring about about since the emergency. But when she came back week after week, he understood that she wasn't interested in finding someone who would say yes to what she asked for. She got off on having someone who could never say no.

Whatever she wanted, she was one of the only people he saw these days. His normal acquaintances had mostly fled at the start of the emergency, including any sensers who could leverage connections or money or a rare sort of sensitivity-aided social engineering. Jamie had once managed three dozen in New York, but now her Chinatown office was more of an ad hoc community center for them, and the ones who had come to the city seeking asylum from state laws. Or so she told him – he stayed away during those hours, coming only when she was likely to be almost alone, with no one but her daughter watching while she assigned him what seemed increasingly like charity jobs. New York perspired with grief now, and cryptosensitivity was cheap. There was no need to pay anyone to assess the situation.

But Jamie would never have visited him, and he had another night before enduring the peacekeeper; neither of them would explain the doorbell that was buzzing now. To ignore it, that would have been the safe thing. Instead, he stumbled off the couch and thumbed the nearly broken button of the intercom.

“Hello?”

“John?” Even through the static, he could hear the voice crack at the end of his name, and he nearly froze, suddenly too short of breath to answer.

“John, it's Laurel.”

He scraped a shaking hand along the sides of his kitchen table, feeling for his keys.

“I know,” he managed, before heading down the stairs.

Before the emergency, Laurel liked to call herself the world's most normal cryptosensitive, or the world’s most sensitive normal. She pulled party tricks, took consulting jobs. Gave talks on “interpreting the sensitive mind.” She was eccentric enough to stand out, familiar enough to blend in. The creaking, Brooklyn-tinged voice and the round, genial face, putting clients at ease while she funneled them through Jamie to people with far more natural talent than herself. She and John had met during one of these talks, gone to dinner after a second, and gone to bed before the third.

But in the weeks after Bowling Green, he had felt marked, while she had passed for ordinary. Either what skill she had wasn't enough to trip the tests, or she had proved able to talk her way out, because he'd seen her get past security checks that delayed him for hours. Every time he opened the door to their flat, he half expected her to have left him behind. He was lucky that she had grown up here, he supposed – it probably tied her to the place much more strongly than he ever could.

She had broken ties with Jamie quickly and brutally, calling her old life a phase, experimentation, a joke. The only person she kept was him. Whatever else she had done, he owed her for that. She had shielded him as well as she could from the suspicion of peacekeepers and civil servants and fundamentalists while he quietly pursued his trip to Bowling Green, even though he had told her almost nothing about what he was doing. She had shielded him, at least until he had slipped out that night.

It must have been the week before Christmas that he left, because he remembered trying to plan a holiday party with Laurel and her shrinking circle of friends. A lot of buttoned-down local administrators and businesswomen and their husbands, and some distant friends of relatives. The only person John had wanted to invite was Jamie. Laurel, feigning (he hoped) jealousy, had refused to talk about it. "Go get us a tree," she'd said instead. "They already think we're pagans out here in most of America; might as well play the part.”

He couldn't remember clearly, but that might have been the last real conversation they'd had.

The Laurel who met him at the bottom of the stairs was sharper, her face thinned and her irreverently asymmetrical bob grown out and clipped back. But even though he knew that her smile was probably a forced reaction – it wasn't appropriate, not in these circumstances – it was still as winning as it had been a year ago.

“You look as gorgeous as ever, John.”

“And you're as terrible a liar as ever.” His own smile and laugh were not, he imagined, as convincing.

Laurel tipped her head slightly upward, towards the stairs, and he nodded. “Here, come up.”

She touched his hand as they entered his flat. He let it linger. He didn't look her in the eye, even when he pushed aside a pile of clothes and they sat by each other on the sofa.

“Don't you ever clean?”

He shrugged. “I'm a dangerous fugitive. Would hate to destroy evidence.”

“Jamie said you were still working.”

“Jamie said?”

“I looked her up. How I found you – asked her about it. She said you changed your name. I thought...” she looked around the flat. “I thought she meant you'd got married.”

“And you came anyways. Got nostalgic, did you?”

Her smile went too wide for a second, like a carnivorous crescent moon. “No,” she said. “I mean – sure. But no. It's something I told Jamie, too. I’m here to give you a warning, if you don’t know already.”

“I must not.”

“Damn, I was hoping you wouldn't say that.” She sucked in a breath. “What I mean is, something’s coming to New York.” John met her eyes for the first time since he’d opened the door. They were as sharp as he remembered. She returned the look. “No, not coming, I guess,” she said. “It’s already here. Jamie thought you could have a bead on it, after your... visit.”

“What’s already here?”

Laurel shrugged, but left her shoulders up, defensive. “Something weird. Big... or that’s what Jamie says. The kind of thing that's been fucking around with Bowling Green.”

“Oughtn’t peacekeeping have snuffed it? What they do, after all.”

“Snuff it?” She looked at John wryly. “From what I've heard, they can't even guard the place.”

A year ago, he could have had something witty to say in response. Now, his thoughts were diverted into tamping down dread.

Laurel frowned, and John took in the dull green of her dress and the streak of premature gray that ran through her dark hair. He wondered how different he looked to her – if she might actually have meant her compliment on the stairs. His scars didn't show, after all, not with his clothes on. She didn't seem to have noticed the stiffness in his fingers. Or she had, and didn't care. _Or she did, and she liked it,_ whispered some ugly part of himself.

“Are you alright, John?” Laurel asked. “Never mind, I know you're not.”

“Never better,” he said instinctively, before she’d finished her second sentence. “Sorry. But I really am fine, at least taking into account…” he spread his hands and forced a grin “...the recent unpleasantness.”

Laurel started to say something and cut it off. “Sure, then.” She unzipped the bag she'd been carrying and pulled out a dark-labeled bottle. “Cabernet?” she asked. “I thought I remembered you liked it. If you didn't... I don't know. You were the sensitive one, after all.” As though that had anything to do with it.

John kept half an eye on her as he pulled a pair of squat discount glasses off the shelf. “I'm not prepared, sorry.” He wasn't going to tell her that he hadn't drunk since he'd left Dresden's – since he'd dug himself a little ways out of the deep hole the Pier had left in his life. Laurel tipped the bottle towards them, twisting its neck when she finished pouring. The wine was the color of old blood, and probably expensive. She had always known better than he had.

He half expected the first sip to bring back Dresden and Inwood and pain, but all it tasted of was dark fruits and the sandpaper of tannins. He finished his glass quickly, without speaking, and reached for the bottle. Laurel stopped him, pouring it herself. Her hand rested on the glass above his.

“Jamie told me,” she said suddenly. “It’s okay. She told me and I’m so sorry.”

The second glass went down even easier. His head felt slightly buoyant.

“Told you what?”

“She told me the police took you. She said they... hurt you.”

The way she said it left no doubt it was a euphemism. At best, a terrible understatement.

“It doesn't matter now.”

“You have to know I thought you’d just left for a while and there were, all those fights we had…” she clenched a fist around her glass. “But if I had known I would have come and fucking killed them. If I knew you were there… I would have fucking killed them.”

“You wouldn’t have _fucking_ killed anyone,” he said. “Don’t play make-believe.” He'd known killers, since Bowling Green. Dresden might have killed for him. The thought made him slide his wine glass across the table, nearly out of reach. “What exactly did Jamie tell you?”

“She didn't go into details.”

John could still tell when Laurel was lying – lying on short notice, at least, before she'd started getting herself to believe it. His old frustrations – with her glibness, her thoughtlessness – began to resurface. But part of him was just glad she knew, and had come anyways.

“You could have called me,” Laurel continued. “When you got out.”

“It was risky enough finding Jamie. Besides, we wouldn't have been... good together.”

Laurel hooked her fingers around his glass and pulled it towards her. She drained it without asking him, tipping it to catch the dregs.

“Show me.”

“Show you wh...”

She reached over and unfastened the top button of his shirt. “If you want me to know. Show me.”

John put his hands up to hers and hesitated, until she kissed him.

She tasted like last year. When he returned her kiss, he wasn't sure if what he wanted was the woman in front of him, or the one he had left to search for Bowling Green. Or if what he wanted was Laurel at all, and not just the trip back in time that she offered.

It didn't, he decided, matter.

Nonetheless, he flinched when she freed another button. She didn't notice -- he couldn't imagine she wouldn't care, if she had -- but by the time she reached the third, she hesitated. "Are you all right--"

"Yes," he said too quickly. "I'm just... things aren't the same any more."

"You," she said, undoing his jeans, "You feel the same."

"I-- take off my shirt, then." She loosened her grip on him. "Take it off."

His fingers refused to steady themselves enough to undo the buttons. He let Laurel slide it off, revealing what the peacekeeper saw every week.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. Though he couldn't see it, he knew what she was looking at. Below the cut-out tattoo, lines competed for attention: thick, shiny burns, peppered with smaller dots of them, topped with thin, keloidal patterns – sketches, carved into his flesh by someone to whom he wasn't even a canvas but a disposable notepad.

He shuddered under Laurel's fingers but didn't pull away. It had been so long since anyone touched him, kissed him, without expecting anything more than mutual affection. He still could hardly believe she didn't -- he half-expected her to push him down and take what she wanted.

But she only moved her hand back to his shoulder, then his cheek, drawing his face toward her. "You are so much," she said, "so much braver than I could ever be."

This time he was the one turning and burying his face in her shoulder, "I want you," he whispered in her ear, drawing the clip out to feel her hair fall across his skin. "Please --" he forgot all the echoes of the words, when he had been forced to say them to women he hated, women who had hurt him -- "Please. Now."


	3. Premonition from the Tombs

“Do you ever feel like this has happened before?” Laurel asked him in bed the next morning, stretching her naked arms off the side of the mattress.

“It has.”

“No, all of it. Everything we’ve ever done. Except, I don’t know, backwards.”

“A block of Manhattan is bloody ethereal. There’s not a lot I’ll rule out.”

“Ha. Maybe it’s parallel universes. Maybe if I’d ordered pepperoni instead of cheese that one time we’d still be able to get out of here.”

He tried to laugh with her, but he couldn’t.

In his cell at the Pier, someone had scratched galvanized coating off the wall in a carefully symmetrical Rorschach pattern. For hours, trying to ignore the perpetual chill, he’d traced its edges over and over, assigning decisions he’d made to every curve. He’d found so many mistakes that he couldn’t even remember them day to day, and he worked through each one to find the pivots. He discounted the obvious ones: coming to New York in the first place, not leaving immediately. The ones that preoccupied him were tiny things. What if he’d stopped at a diner instead of going straight to Bowling Green? Or turned the corner earlier? Or had a better lie, or run left instead of right? 

“Do you know why you’re here?” someone had asked him once, a rhetorical cliche. _No,_ he could have told her, _but I have a decent shortlist._

“Hey,” he said now, to Laurel. “Who told you about this… thing coming?”

She put her arms down and propped herself on the sofa's arms. “Could have been a few people.”

“Which few people? How do you know anybody who would talk about something like that with you but not with Jamie? You didn’t even stay in touch with sensers.”

“I know a lot of people. I’m…” she stopped. “Do you want me to be honest? Do you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I work with plenty of sensers, John. I work in the Tombs.”

“What?” He tried to push himself off the bed. She held him back.

“Don’t. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything. I triage, that’s all, I just give the tests --”

She tried to kiss him, but he wrenched free, searched for jeans and pulled them on. “Never changed then, did you? _Understanding the sensitive mind._ Never stopped making your living off us.”

“Would it be better if it was someone else? Somebody who’d cut you up and…” she stopped.

“It'd mean fuck-all either way,” he said. “Your noble bit of self-sacrifice would have gotten me a nice half-hour. It took me two months, Laurel. Cutting me up would have been the best thing someone could do.”

***

He had tried to run in the dark, when they found him coming out of Bowling Green. Then, he had tried to fight them with glove-padded fists. If he'd been nearer the unearthly center of the emergency zone, near the Green itself, he might have been able to lose them in the confusion. In the buffer ring around it, they had only laughed and wrenched his arms back. They pushed him to one of the metal trailers that had surrounded Bowling Green back then, where a pair of black-uniformed women sat across from him.

“So what, you got lost?” one said. “Wandered all the way past two barricades in the middle of the night?”

John said nothing.

“Nobody except smugglers and hookers out here at this time of night. Maybe cryptosense terrorists.” The other leaned back on the bench and popped her knuckles. “You don't look like a terrorist, sweetheart. You a hooker? Maybe looking for a new clientèle.”

He stopped himself from answering. He knew better than to try to bluff or lie his way out, here. At the epicenter of the emergency.

The woman, straw-haired and pink-faced, stopped twisting her fingers to look at him. Slowly, she stood and walked the few paces to his side of the room. He looked through her as she ran a hot, damp hand up his neck. His head jerked back as she slapped him, but he managed to stifle a cry. “I _said_. Are you a hooker?”

He felt the hand move down again, under his collar. “Why, 'sthat the only way a man'll let you touch him?”

Her fingers touched his skin, and he tried not to pull away, to let her know she was getting to him. “Looks like I'm touching you just fine.”

“You're right. That's really a -- it's a step up.” It all felt unreal, like it had to be happening to someone else, or in a dream. After the Bowling Green Block, that was the only thing that made sense. He still couldn't quite believe what he had seen, even on the outskirts. Or the sense that accompanied it, not of loss but of powerful alienation. No death, no pain, despite everything that had happened. And then there was the static, the motion that was stillness, like an optical illusion seen both ways at once.

The second button went. She put her lips to his ear, touched his earlobe with the tip of her tongue. “There's nowhere to run. The possibilities are endless.”

She was kneading the skin of his chest, and he kept his eyes on the tall, freckled woman still across from him, praying for her to do something. They would never have done this before, not so casually. It was Bowling Green that had thrown out all the rules, even the ones that had nothing to do with physics or cryptopsychology. Now, the woman wouldn't look at him, only through him.

He thought of Laurel, probably still asleep, not knowing he was gone. He had intended her to never find out, to spare them a fight. She had managed to quash the curiosity they'd once shared; responsibility for them both weighed too heavily on her. Maybe it was for the best if she thought he'd simply left her.

“Come on,” the tall woman said uncomfortably.

The woman next to John paused, fingers lifting from his skin. "You go ahead," she said. In the corner of his eye, John could see her smile. "I can handle him."

He tried to catch the tall woman's gaze. She still wouldn't do it, wouldn't acknowledge him at all. He wouldn't plead with her, wouldn't beg to be treated like a human. He would only to try to make her see him.

She shut the door behind her very quietly as she left, as if she somehow thought she was sneaking out unnoticed. It was the only hint of acknowledgment he got.

The one who remained finished unbuttoning his shirt, letting the cold of the night sting his skin.

"Go to hell," he spat. He kicked at her, catching one of her shins, and he got to see her hop back, hand slipping off him. He twisted his wrists in the restraints, not sure what he was trying to do. They weren't even proper handcuffs, just padded leather straps that stopped him from moving more than a few inches from the bench. Like something to put on a mental patient, like they were meant to protect him. They stretched but wouldn't give, and bolts held the bench down, and even if he had somehow gotten around both those things there were still the streets to navigate.

The MP – they hadn't called them peacekeepers yet, then – hadn't tried to approach him again. She stood a few feet away, watching him struggle. Even when he tried to resist all he did was entertain them.

"Are you done?" she asked.

"What's fucking wrong with you?" John sat stiff as she approached him. "So afraid of not looking tough that you can't even get close to something without trying to-" His voice broke on the last words because she had hit him, a curt backhanded blow that snapped his head back.

"Men are cute when they try to get philosophical," she said. The next slap drove his lip into his teeth. She touched the spot of blood that welled up in its wake, running her thumb down his chin to wipe it clean. "But they're not very smart about it.”

John just glared at her, willing himself not to say anything when she hit him again. She laughed. "Not talking now? 'sokay. I don't really need you to. And everybody else... well, let's see." This time she was clear of his legs when she pulled off his shirt, pricked a test strip into his skin. It gave him some small satisfaction to feel her hand jerk slightly when she saw the results. "Well," she said, voice hardening. "Can't say I didn't expect it." She sat on the bench beside him and spoke directly into his ear, the aspiration making him flinch. “Know what this means, don't you? You ever heard of the Tombs? They're gonna want to know everything in that freak brain of yours. And they're not gonna take it out clean.”

"You're pathetic." He hated the small, brittle sound of his words. But the MP pulled back.

"Fuck you," she said. He only half heard it, because she had grabbed a handful of his hair and knocked his head against the metal wall -- once, twice, more times that he didn't count. His vision blurred, and he was falling, and he somehow thought the straps to his cuffs must be broken, because his arms were being pulled back and he was laying flat on the bench, but it only made his head hurt to think about it. He closed his eyes and tried to remember exactly what he'd seen in Bowling Green. If he was going to die for it -- and he would die, he was starting to be sure of that -- he needed to convince himself that it had been worth it.

Even to someone who wasn't sensitive, the center of Bowling Green was nearly impossible to approach. He'd read about that in the papers at the time, the firefighters who stopped at the edge of the street seemingly without noticing that they'd done so, the police who set up perimeters dozens of feet too wide. For him, it was like cutting through a forest of snarled, fraying, contradictory thoughts. It felt like a wave, other people would say later. It felt like a wave of knives. Of tin. Of broken glass. The only thing worse than the feeling was the fact that when they looked up after it had passed, the block was still there, and they could not bring themselves to go near it.

There could be no official death count, no recovery of bodies. When national guardswomen managed to steel themselves enough to make it into the outer layers -- a feat facilitated by noise-canceling earphones and dark glasses -- every single human being had vanished. He wasn't sure if anyone had ever reached the very center. But at least he had gotten close enough to know that it did not feel the way he expected. Despite the darkness and the looming brick walls, for a moment, he had felt almost agoraphobic. As if when he looked through that static, he was looking in on something as big as a whole world.

He came back to himself what must have been a few minutes later, staring up at the trailer's stippled drop ceiling. His arms had been lashed down to the bench, and when he tilted his head, he saw the MP standing above him, grinning. Slowly, excruciatingly, she swung a leg across him and rested on his hips.

"You know what?" She waited, but he didn't respond, just rested his head back on the bench and closed his eyes. He was beginning to shake -- he couldn't help it, it was the cold and the fear and the complete helplessness, and at the core of all of it the growing conviction that this was just the beginning.

She shifted forward until she had an elbow on his chest and a hand around his shoulder; he could feel that if he opened his eyes, he would be looking straight into hers.

"You know what? I wouldn't even fuck a freak like you. But I might as well have a feel of what I'm missing.”

He was unable to resist as she slipped her hand into his trousers and rubbed at him roughly. He only thought of Laurel and of London, wondering if he would see either ever again.


	4. A Grave on the River

Jamie only met him outside the office in parks, and only in little playground ones, the sort limited to parents with children – when there were enough people in New York for anyone to care. Once, early on, John had asked if it was really safe to meet him with her daughter. Jamie had laughed. “Where else would she go?”

“With your husband,” John had said. She had spent favors to get him out of the city immediately after Bowling Green, when checkpoints were still detaining people almost at random. At first, she mentioned him offhandedly, like he had just gone out for groceries. _You should try the Met, Lewis loves it_ or _Antonia's got awful taste in food, all Lewis’ fault of course._ Then the executive order had extended roadblocks and a guard force indefinitely, and it became clear that the emergency was a permanent one. Maybe she still called him sometimes, on satellite phone. But all outward signs of him – the references, the wedding ring – were gone. “Or Christ, you could just hire someone to watch her for a couple of hours. What if peacekeeping stops you?”

“Then she’ll know,” Jamie had said. “And if it comes to... worse... I’d rather have her see me put away than think I’d disappeared. Maybe if she was a boy I’d worry more, but...”

There was no mass roundup of sensers, nor the dubious suppression experiments that John heard about outside. But even back then, before his journey into Bowling Green, everyone knew that the MPs were a paranoid surveillance force. And if a test turned up positive, they were liable to find something to charge the suspect with.

John suspected that Jamie had kept her daughter close by for a simpler reason, though: no one knew how cryptosensitivity worked. What if it was hereditary, a latent genetic combination that had one day blossomed into something uncanny? It might be better not to know.

Now, a year later, Antonia was nearly too old to find the playground entertaining, but she wasn’t yet too self-conscious to sit, cross-legged, atop the low bars like a meditating nun – or a senser in deep concentration.

“So Laurel found you?”

“That she did. Came right over from the Tombs, did she? Runs tests.”

“Well... that’s something.” Jamie chewed her lip. “I’d guessed, a little. She was always a hustler.” Antonia looked up, and Jamie waved her off. “But I don’t think she’s lying, about something big. She told me yesterday. I remember, because a day before that, I sent somebody to do an _exorcism_.”

There was no such thing. The dead, those existed. But they were only fragments, and they didn’t need to be told to move on. They dissolved. That was, at least John’s theory. Either way, he'd never heard of a “possession” any stronger than a gentle nudge of the fingers during sleep.

“Okay, so what was it really?”

“Some overstressed accountant discovering her latent sensitivity, I'd assumed, with the kind of religious baggage that makes you jump straight past 'mild psychic' to 'possessed by the devil.' But she had a letter for us when we got there – a whole damn notebook of a letter. And not even for us, really. For you.”

Jamie slipped him an old-fashioned green ledger, the front labeled neatly with his names, old and new. Jamie knew both his names, and so did the peacekeeper, perhaps. Laurel knew, but not until Jamie told her. And Dresden... of course Dresden knew. She had named him.

But the moment he touched the book, he knew this was not some wildly out-of-character joke from any of them. The pages bristled with familiar static. And the script was the same as the verses on his envelope, just after Bowling Green. The same as the lines he woke up to every morning, written on whatever surface was available.

_I was His companion once,_ it began.

***

__  
I was His companion once, when He had no form and I was still They, and They watched Him work for six days. It began with a question.

_“Why did you make her just now, from the rib?” They had asked Him, as He finished the man and crafted his helpmate. “Why not make them the same, or make them both from dust?”_

_“For the same reason I created, and you watched,” He had said. “Because nothing can be high without something low. Because power can't exist without weakness. And because I can already feel that one of them is going to betray my trust, and I can't stand for it to be this perfect man.”_

_They only laughed. But quietly, They planned. Eve ate sin, the knowledge of good and evil, the way He and They knew she would. But They whispered in her ear first: find your husband. If your eyes are opened and not his, you will never be together. And They, They and the woman, ruined it all._

_He confronted Them. “But what could we possibly have done to hurt you?” They said. “We're only low. Low and weak.”_

_“I'll give you another chance. Help me put the world in order,” He said. “Help me make things the way they were supposed to be.”_

_“I've seen your order,” They said. “I'd rather side with weakness. I'd rather side with her.”_

_They didn't understand that order was necessary, he told Them. Wives, obey your husbands. Husbands, love your wives. Love them as you love your dog. Love them as you love your house. Tear them down if you no longer need them. Collar them if they try to leave. Shoot them if they do you wrong._

_The cold man, like a husband, would not be mocked._

_He crossed the expressway, not bothering to watch for cars – they couldn't do anything to him, anyway. On the other side, at the Pier, was a space he remembered well. It was there, after all, that they had tried to catch him._

***

The Tombs' senser ward was common knowledge even before John's capture, reported in alternative newspapers. Its name conjured something more ancient and sinister than the hastily delineated medical station where a masked woman scraped at his skin and drew his blood, shined a penlight into his eyes. He never knew how much of the testing meant anything, and how much was random guesswork or deliberate misdirection, except for the needled strips that he had become increasingly familiar with. This time no one flinched or gawked, only motioned for guards to pull him up, cuff him, and release him into a freezing and mildewed solitary cell. As he stood on the bed, peering out of its single slit window, his fear was tempered by curiosity. He had developed a psychic sense and crossed an ocean to test its limits, but even then the past day was too overwhelming to feel real.

The next day they pulled him out, asked him to take his shirt off, and inked a symbol onto his shoulder. It looked sharp and unfamiliar, although he caught only glimpses of it in his peripheral vision as he pulled his shirt on – they'd taken his coat, and his clothing under it was thin enough that he could see blood from the needle marks spotting through the fabric.

“Never seen this one before,” said one guard to the other behind him. “Which site's it supposed to send him?”

The other put his handcuffs back on and pushed him forward – not back to the cell, but towards the lift. “The Pier,” she said.

“What the hell is that?”

“Like I could tell you,” she said. They descended, and John got the last glimpse of the outside world he'd see for months. “I think we're better off not knowing.”

By the time they pushed him out of the van and onto the damp cement of the Pier, his curiosity was beginning to settle into dread. He could barely make out pipes on the ceiling, and the only light came from dirt-frosted window lattices along the sides. Shipping crates had been set up as makeshift barriers, topped with loops of razor wire. They entered through one of them, keypads on each end – like an airlock, John thought, to the world's worst-designed submarine. As they began to key the combination for the far side, someone slipped a hood over his head, and dread finally won out.

Not far past the barrier, the echoes of his footsteps softened, as if they'd left the cavernous space behind. A door opened, and they guided him down stairs. The temperature dropped abruptly – if this was a literal pier, they must be underwater, John thought. After the last sound of a key turning, they yanked the hood off.

It was another crate, he realized, barely lit by a vent in the back. They hooked his handcuffs to a bar on one side and left him nearly hanging, tattoo smarting in the cold air.

He stayed silent for what felt like hours, arms burning. Time fractured and stretched. Maybe they were never coming back at all – he didn't even know why they'd brought him here, anyway. “Hello?” he called, first cautiously and then louder. His voice rebounded in the confines of the crate, through stale air. He could barely stay on his feet, and every time he moved, the handcuffs wore another fraction of skin off his wrists. They were going to let him die, he thought again. This was all some final preparation for dissecting him, seeing if his mind held the key to Bowling Green.

The door cracked open. He was too tired to lift his head and see who it was that freed his hands, letting him collapse to the crate's floor. They hooded him and dragged him to a cement shower stall and told him to strip, their voices muffled by a curtain. After agonizing minutes of getting his feet back under him, they turned the water on from outside, as cold as everything else. His wrists were bleeding, he realized, before the stinging water washed them clean. When he was done they tossed a gray cotton uniform in to him, waiting for him to put it on before blinding him again. But instead of his cell, they took him up the stairs, leaving him with the woman he would only ever know as the captain.

The captain's room was joyless and windowless, and her uniform bore no marks. Her nose had been broken, probably long ago, and her shallow eyes barely made a dent in her face. There was no feeling on her – no guilt, no pain, only a ghoulish phlegmatism. When spoke, it was with a dull lethargy that verged on impediment.

“Well,” she said, pulling his head back and tracing the line of his jaw as delicately as her thick hands would allow. “Are you scared?”

They were alone now, and he could barely stand, let alone respond. It didn't matter. She knocked him to the floor and slid a hand up his shirt, pulling it over his head to trap his arms. He realized, too late, what was going to happen. “Please... don't.” he said, lying on his back under her.

She whispered in his ear, groping at him. “Please don't what?”

His blood burned. “Fuck you. You know.”

The captain laughed. “Mm. Has someone,” she said, “Has anyone forced you before?”

John's heart was pounding as he paused. “No.”

She grabbed his wrist. Sudden, unbearable agony. There were tears in his eyes when she let go. “Lie better.”

“I...” he couldn't collect enough thoughts to even remember what she wanted. She slotted her fingers along his ribs and squeezed.

“Were you a virgin?”

She brushed his wrist again, and his breath caught. Half his body felt on fire, and the cement was freezing against his back, and she could do anything she wanted to him.

“No.”

“Tell me.”

He nodded slightly and closed his eyes. “I was nineteen. A party."

“Who was she?”

“They were, I don't – just girls, just from around. I was too plastered to remember much.” The captain's hand was pressing into his chest. Her weight lifted, and she pinned his arms above his head, rubbing her thumb across his blistered wrists. The pain wrapped around him like a blanket, threatening to smother him. “Stop,” he said without meaning to. “God, please stop.”

The captain let up on his wrists and lowered her brow, as if thinking of something distant. “There's no God here,” she said, her voice strangely distant. “And it's a damned good thing.” Then she was back with him again, and she leaned close to him and looked into his eyes. “Lie better.”

“I'm not lying, I didn't know them, not much. They were older. I still saw them at parties sometimes, after. I never told anyone.” He had managed to not even think of it in years. Now, he remembered sounds more than images. The rip of fabric, their laughter, the almost ocean-like throb of his pulse in his ears. He swallowed, trying to breathe. The captain saw it and yanked his head back again, biting his ear.

“That can't have been too long ago.”

“Almost ten years.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

He held back an instinctive denial, imagining her response: _lie better_. “What do you think? I wanted to crawl out of my skin, even when it felt good. Especially when...” he trailed off.

The captain had stripped his trousers off and was undoing her flies. “When it felt good? Listen to yourself. They did you like a whore and you loved it. Get down to it, and that's what men want. No matter what they say.”

He shut his eyes and thought of England, a stupid gallows joke – he could have been back there, if he hadn't been so reckless as to chase something right into the jaws of the great American monster. He wouldn't be fighting this mixture of arousal and hurt, knowing that the captain would see it if he broke. She whispered in his ear while she fucked him: _Don't cry. You'll be used to it soon._

She forced him to come after she had, explored his body with her hands. Finally, she rolled off him and dressed herself. He was still on the floor as she shook her hair out and went to the room beyond her office, leaving him alone. The room was nearly empty and the light burned his eyes, but for the first time since he had arrived, he was something like free. Trembling, he slid his clothes on. He knew that the door to the room would be unlocked even before he tried it, because sooner or later something had to go right; the universe could not be designed with pure hostility toward him.

The hall outside was dirty gunmetal, he saw, stretching to the other side of the pier. He braced himself, leaving blood on the walls as he crept forward. Then he heard the voice in his ear: “I ought to make you clean that up.”

John slipped. From the outside, it must have looked like a pratfall, looked funny, but he was on his hands and knees and everything hurt and all he could see was the floor as the captain's hand squeezed his shoulder. 

“Christ,” he said, almost entirely to himself. And then, louder, the only thing he could think to say. “I'm sorry. It was -- a nice wall.”

She didn't bother to blindfold him when she pulled him downstairs, into an empty room. A couple of the guards followed her, kicking him spitefully when she dropped him on the ground. He closed his eyes and thought only of the small, rough pits in the floor. Its cement was pain-stained, even more than the rest of this place.

_Can you see the future?_ Was the first question some people asked when they learned he was sensitive. No, he couldn't. _Well, can you see the past?_ That was closer to the truth. Until his sudden talent for writing, he couldn't tell someone exactly what improprieties happened in their ancestral home. But the past wasn't events, it was feelings. More often than not, bad ones – unless that was his peculiar talent, being the man who chased horrors.

“What,” the captain said, leaning over him, “What did you think would happen?”

He didn't know. He had never imagined getting free, barely imagined finding a way to reach the outside world. He had only been compelled to prove that, for a moment, he could do something.

They worked him over with an electrical prod, blanking his mind as neatly as a magnet on a cassette tape over and over. Not even hurting him, but rearranging him. Until eventually he screamed and shook and begged and curled on the floor, thinking of the next person who would come and feel _his_ pain on the cold cement. At least, he thought, some part of him would survive.


	5. Future Omniscient

The notebook was not a letter, John thought. It was a combination of surreal memoir and fairy tale and horror story, leaving him more confused than ever. But it was... omniscient. Whatever minds were behind automatic writing, they recalled only disjointed fragments of reality, like a numbers station with a bad signal. They didn't write treatises – and certainly not to a man they'd never met, claiming some gibberish alternate interpretation of a religion that was silly to begin with. Ghosts, in a strange way, seemed logical. A petty, feuding two-being pantheon was not. He turned the page, and the thought stopped short.

_Do you know what happened to the captain?_

“Why the bloody fuck would I want to?” he muttered to no one.

_She was fighting a holy war, the holiest war there is. There's no god here – and it's a damned good thing. When she sensed it was lost, she killed herself._

He trusted its words – if only because he so deeply wanted to believe them.

***

  
__  
When He banished His companion through the gate of horn, she hadn't spirited Eve away with her – that would be silly, trite. Adam's sons still pined for an explanation of their newfound pain, and so He told them about the Adversary, a worthy foe that only He could have created. Not the pitiful thing that whiled away eternity tending to the unholy dead. Not me.

_And so He had failed to notice when the Adversary held a warped mirror to His creation, cluttered her domain with a perverse and incomplete pocket where His imposed order was reversed. A grotesque place with no history and no future, bleeding slowly into the rest of her twilight world of the dead – that's what the cold man thought when he arrived, because here, even His avatar can't hide his thoughts from me._

_Maybe he never would have arrived, if not for one of my curious creations._

_Did she know what she did, the first woman here who asked a revenant for the true name of God? My dead know things that even angels never will, and they answered the question she should have asked instead. The god you're asking for, She doesn't exist, it wrote. That god would destroy you if He would, because you were never His children. And He heard, having felt his name spoken._

_But He takes a looser view of time than the rest of us, and the world I sheltered was beyond his reach at first, like a line running parallel to his own creation. And in that period the woman told powerful friends in secret, who styled themselves a resistance, a tribulation force. They learned what they could from the dead, declaring war on a divinity that was never theirs. When the line tilted, throwing our worlds momentarily against each other, they thought they were prepared. They learned binding rituals and the language of angels, put their plans in motion: in many places, but none darker than the Pier._

_No one – no matter how many guards and barricades and scientific renegades they employ, can fight a god. But no one has ever tried harder than they did, or hurt so many people in the process._

_With his hand on the wall, the cold man could feel everything when he arrived downtown: the thump of feet in the subways, prayers to a false god, diatribes against a true one. Women in uniform with the anger of trapped roaches. The end would come soon, with or without his intervention. He was only there to hasten the process – a tourist, and an exterminator._

***

  
For all the weeks he was there, John saw little of the Pier beyond the stifling inside of his crate, the captain's brutalist quarters, and eventually, the room where they took him apart.

The first time they took him there, his wrists had barely scabbed over, and the mark of shock prods were still on his skin. He heard the faint noises that convinced him he was not the only prisoner here – muffled pleas and monologues, delivered to no audience. Then a door creaked open and they pushed him into a chair, even colder than the rest of the Pier.

He expected to be questioned for something, even if he had no idea what it might be. He would have given them anything they asked for. But their requests were inscrutable. It didn't seem to matter what he knew, and it barely seemed to matter who he was at all. Except -- as he realized the moment they tried putting a pencil between the fingers of his right hand -- that he was sensitive.

They hurt him casually, at first: cigarettes on his arms and the prod at his back. His screams were muffled by the sack over his face, and his hand remained still – there was no one to raise, nothing to channel. Finally, when he was barely conscious, they threw him back into the crate with a loaf of indeterminate food and a soft plastic cup of water.

They came for him at random after that. Their methods grew more creative, whether out of need or out of boredom: knives rubbed with pepper oil, hot nails in his flesh. He wasn't being interrogated like a spy, he was being shaken and pried apart like a puzzle box they couldn't be bothered to solve properly.

He developed a frantic animal response to the hood's thick linen. On the best days, he could stay perfectly still when they came for him, ignoring the way that fear made his head hurt and his throat tighten. On the worst ones he broke his rule and tried futilely to get away. He was bruised and cold and perpetually short of breath, and the captain had begun to amuse herself by scratching patterns on his skin with a utility knife.

John had played out dying hundreds of times in his head – the method, the place. He had tried to make them do it, once. If he had been a woman it might have worked, and if he had been killed, he at least would have died with some dignity. But they _wanted_ him. They would never let him die, because he was no threat to them, because he was more property than person. One didn't kill an animal – only hit it, and used it, and put it back in its cage.

He did not try to make them kill him when they opened the door for the last time.

The room's peculiar mildew smell had burned itself into his mind, and he gagged when he entered. They strapped him to the chair and slid a stick of hard charcoal and a pad of paper under his one free hand. Then, they pulled the hood off.

The walls were cement, soft and rotten. A stainless-steel table in the corner held instruments he didn't want to think about. And a woman he'd never seen was looking straight at him.

He didn't know if she had always been the one to hurt him, or if she had appeared for the first time. She wore dull grey like a communist functionary, collar stiff and skirt falling straight to her calves. No clothing could have suited her less. She was... golden, might have been the word, with a round dark face and hair striated and tousled in a way no real sun and wind could ever manage. Beneath the surfer carelessness, her eyes -- deep brown, nearly black -- never left his.

As he did every time, John scoured his memory for something the woman might want from him. He hunted again for a fragment to channel, but if anything was there, he'd never learned writing well enough to find it. The woman leaned forward, as if about to speak. John gripped the charcoal in anticipation. Then, his heart sank.

She spoke a language that was sinuous and unfamiliar, the rise at the end indicating a question that he couldn't answer. An interminable wait, and then the first thing he understood was the hard crack of a rod against his other hand. He tried to move the charcoal over the paper, looking at her desperately to see if she would somehow indicate what he was supposed to do. She only responded with another line of seductive, garbled, meaningless words.

An orderly – one of the ones who'd pinned him to the floor of his cell and had him the night before – moved toward him, but the surfer waved her off. "It needs a better draw," she said with what he'd learned to recognize as Western twang. Slowly, she approached him and carefully cupped his off hand with both palms. In his panic it felt almost kind -- no one had touched him with real kindness since he left Laurel, and he no longer knew how long ago that was. He tried to hold onto that feeling when she grasped his little finger and twisted.

"Please I--- ahh- " She wasn't even speaking now; how could he do what they wanted if they wouldn't even ask him anything? Her hands jerked, and his finger folded with them.

For a mad few seconds he wondered if this meant it was broken or dislocated, and what the difference was anyways -- and then the first wave of real pain set in and all he could do was clench his teeth and breathe slowly. His hand was on fire, but she was moving across it, to his ring finger.

He shook his head, fear filling his lungs like water. She wasn't quick this time, made him feel it as the bones bent farther than they were ever supposed to go and then gave out with a horrible snap and tear. And all through it, she spoke again, in that language that he couldn't understand. He was shaking violently, trying to steady his good hand enough to keep from dropping the charcoal. The streaks and smudges he left in the process meant nothing to him, and when the surfer looked at the paper and turned back to him disapprovingly, he guessed they must not to her either. 

"What do y-ahh, what do you want?" he asked her, words coming out garbled. "Please, I'll write it, just t-tell me..."

She remained silent – if he hadn't heard her earlier, he might wonder if she knew English at all. Her callused hands pressed closer against his, squeezing the broken fingers together. When she started speaking again, her voice was drowned out by the sound of his frantic pulse.

"Please there's no one -- there's nothing here!" he yelled in desperation. "There's nobody to write! Don't you know that?"

The woman dropped his hand abruptly. She stepped back, becoming a dark haze. "It's useless," she told the orderlies over his head. "He's habituated. Not attractive bait. We need a change." John was too tired to imagine what that might be. But he saw her gesture towards the table, and his flesh began to go cold.

When they freed his ankles, he kicked at her uselessly. She didn't even bother to dodge his weak blow. "Try not to think of anything," she said instead. "You're focusing too hard on what you can do to end this. And the truth is, you can't do anything."

"What's that m..."

They cleared the table and pulled him onto it, fastening his arms behind his back and strapping his legs down as the charcoal skittered across the floor. Behind him, the woman dragged her fingers through his hair. "You can't try. You are not even capable of understanding what any of us might want from you. Except those idiots, maybe,” she said dismissively, jerking her head at the orderlies.

She had walked to the other end of the table, out of sight. Her hand was slipping down his bare ankle now, and he flinched involuntarily. There was only so much she could do to him, he had to remind himself, that someone else had not done already. And then he felt a hard, cold bludgeon against the sole of his foot.

The dead remembered pain well, it seemed. They whispered it among themselves, passing it down through generations and sometimes threading even the imaginary and the impossible into their woe. Through Jamie's other sensers, he had acquired enough words for a catechism of horrors. If only he could remember enough of it to name what they were doing to him.

By the third strike, his nerves jittered. By the fifth, it was hard to breathe. After that, he stopped counting. Every blow resonated through the meat and bones of his feet, until his ankles felt like they would snap from the tension. He wished they would go numb, or drive him unconscious, but the pain made him aware of everything -- the crinkle of the woman's stiff clothes, the posture of the orderlies watching him with what he guessed was satisfaction.

She stopped momentarily to pull his head up and test his pulse. She crushed any hope of reprieve and hit him again, while he gasped for air. Then, everything began to lighten. This would be when he passed out, John thought, finally. Except that he'd done that before, and it felt like a mind shutting down, not spinning out of his control. This felt like being consumed, into something cold and foreign.

It should have frightened him, but he didn't care. It could have his body, whatever it was. It was letting him slip into the back of his own mind, and he was happy giving in to something that at least didn't seem to want his suffering as well. _Hello_ , he thought. _About time you showed up._ If he had believed in heaven, he might have imagined it like this -- at least in the Pier.

If he had believed in hell, it would have been the feeling of the presence receding. Its protective skin was stripped off, leaving nobody but him, exposed and trembling on a metal table.

"No!" He twisted his wrists in the cuffs, ripping open the skin that had barely healed. His feet had long since ceased to feel anything, but he tried to pull them free, still screaming. "I'm sorry!" he said to the woman, who he could not see. "You saw -- I couldn't help it -- I'll try again. Just give me a chance, please, I -- come back! No..." his voice broke, and he knew that the rest of his pleas sounded only like incoherent sobbing. He knocked his head against the table, dizzying himself.

There were no blows to interrupt him. He tried to hit his head again, but one of her hands was in his hair, the other cushioning his face.

"Come on." She spoke softly. "There's no point in you getting hurt any more."

He tried to reply but couldn't manage more than a shallow, halting breath. A weight lightened on his ankles, and he realized that they were free, even if he couldn't move them. The woman slowly separated him from the table, easing him to the chair, pausing when he screamed. There was none of the oily false intimacy of before, and she took her hands off him as soon as he was able to sit on his own. He couldn't see her as more than a blur, but he could make out the soft triangle of her face.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "But we had to try."

Boots, scuffing the floor behind him. "We oughta take him back, then?"

"For now," said the surfer, loud now. "Might need to get him back later, though." He was so exhausted that he barely caught her last, blessed words. "Which means don't _touch_ him. You can fuck around later."

Outside he managed two agonized steps on his injured feet before collapsing, and the orderlies refused to help him up out of spite – if they weren't having any fun, they told him, neither should he. He took their cruelty without complaint, because he wanted so desperately to rest, to get the cold of that thing off him. He remembered making it halfway to his feet, and then an overwhelming wave of pain, and then nothing.


	6. Warm Leatherette

_It was always a desperate plan_ , the journal read. _They wanted to trap him, bind him, delay him because he knew, they knew he knew. He was furious that I had allowed them to know what it was like to be beloved by a god._

It must be an exquisite feeling, John thought. He'd refused the Americans' little crosses for just that reason: better to imagine an uncaring universe than that something is watching at all times, sees every moment of suffering, and simply doesn't care.

_I do care, John. But what I build is fragile. You know the result of my last intervention. You call it Bowling Green._

He should stop, should eat, John knew. Bowling Green had ruined him; he didn't need to go back. But he kept reading.

_My old companion once said he lived in a constant state of past and future, omniscient and omnipotent. My vision only reaches so far. A great many things happen at the same time, a great many possibilities unfold, all of them drawing one way or another back to the thing that He created. The original to my copy. But once, just once, I genuinely tried to change the world._

_It was for love – not mine, but a young couple's. Like all of you, they were living in a mirror of a terrible place – one where real love, between equals, should have been impossible. And they did it anyway. Most of you have, at least a little, despite all his intentions. But they guessed, too. They were both mad, I suppose, but it had given them a strange sort of insight, a connection with my dead. They only found the broad strokes, but they even tried to reach out to me. Me, not the twisted version of Him you keep in your holy books._

_But the man had an ex-lover, with the horror in her – the horror of thoughtless power, bolstered by a million little affirmations around her. She tracked him down and nearly killed him, for reasons I'm sure you know but haven't ever really understood. And I watched, sterile. As I watch everything. That time, though, I couldn't stand by. I tried to show them the other side of the mirror, in hopes that maybe they would understand the sheer stupidity, the arbitrary violence, of what she was doing._

_Instead, the mirror broke. My world was swept into his, my people folding into their other selves. The couple's awareness rippled, past and future – it reached you, even, an ocean away and two years before. I could contain the damage, but I couldn't reverse it, nor change your past from rearranging around it. I wanted to nudge the world, but I sent it spinning out of my control. I meant to temper the monsters who had abused their power. I only gave them more._

The horror – that was something John had learned all too well.

***

John expected to regain consciousness in his cell in the Pier. Instead, he drifted awake to motion and warm, cracked leatherette. He barely noticed it. So much more important was the otherworldly sensation of not being in pain. He tried to lift his suddenly weightless arms, and a suede-gloved hand gently pushed them down.

"Don't move," she said. He recognized the voice – the surfer from the Pier. "And don't worry. It'll be fine."

"What's happening?" he managed to slur.

"As far as anybody else knows, you're transferred to another cryptosensitivity testing site. But people get lost in the system all the time. And you're not going back."

"I..." He was blindfolded, he realized. Again. "Does that mean you're going to kill me?"

"What?" She sounded almost affronted, not like a woman who had tortured him into unconsciousness. "Of course not. I mean..."

A motor revved, horn blared somewhere outside. Outside. He held his breath and put his ear to the window to make sure he was hearing right.

"I'm dropping you in Times Square. Safer than some back alley, but stay quiet. And for god's sa-- and for your own good, I mean, you don't know me. You're never going to see me again, anyway."

He nodded, wondering through the fog of his mind if this was some other trick, designed to get him to drop his guard. Except that he had all but begged her to let him give her what she wanted, and she had stopped.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry using you was the only option we had -- I know you won't believe me, but it was."

"Why?" he croaked, flinching at the sound of a siren. Tears were gathering in the corners of his eyes, beneath the blindfold. He hadn't thought it was possible to feel agoraphobia shut in a car, unable to see. “Why help?”

"Because it won't work now, for better or worse. You aren't any more use. I can't make up for what we did, but they shouldn't get to keep you."

"Why did you... why did you have to?"

"Because we're hated," she said simply. “And some entities like pain.”

He waited for an elaboration that never materialized. Finally he fell back into the seat, and let her stroke his hair until he slept again.

He jolted awake, shivering with sudden cold, alone on a bench. The euphoria was gone, ice settling into his broken fingers, and freedom had never seemed more terrifying.

He wondered where the thing was that had nearly taken him over, and if there was any way to get it back.


	7. Mercy

_Your city's downtown is made of fear. You speak to the dead. Is it so difficult to believe this is an underworld?_

John nearly laughed, but it was bitter in his throat. The Americans, they took God seriously. They invoked her – invoking _him_ would have been some New Age rubbish – when they held their crosses and gave their sons promise rings and told them never to speak to sensers. Before Bowling Green, he paid little attention to it. Before the Pier, he mocked it. Now, he let himself imagine a world where it was all real, in a way they would have loathed.

_Ablockofmanhattanisbloodyethereal. There'snotalotI'llruleout._

The words were scribbled in the margins, like an afterthought, but he recognized them as his own. Laurel – he'd said them to Laurel, the night before he met Jamie, and she'd given him the book. She could have remembered them, added them, he supposed. Colluded with Jamie, called her and snuck them into the journal in the couple of hours between his meetings with both of them. There were logical explanations. But logic seemed to be less and less reliable these days.

_Your lover mentioned universes, but she thinks of them like changing set dressing. She would never imagine a place where she would be afraid on the streets, where people would look at her and see a thing to hurt for sport, sex, god, power. She has never chosen to fight, but she imagines that if she did, she would win, no matter what props she's using. And if she fails, she only has so much to lose – enemies will exact the real price on people not like her. She does want to kill for you, John. Because for her, revenge is painless. Because I made her that way._

_My companion, he was right, John. I am weak. I can only reverse what he does, not change it. If he loves men, I can love women. If he created patriarchs, the best I can make are matriarchs. He could have simply made human beings, if he wanted. I could not._

***

The woman who picked him up stayed in a once-gleaming Midtown hotel, its owners long gone. When she helped him to the washroom and turned on the flickering light, cockroaches skittered under the clawfoot tub, small and sleek and black. Someone had died in the tub, once. John was too tired to figure out how.

The woman said her name was Mercy.

She gave it when he was cleaned and bandaged on her bed, before she turned out the light and solicitously took the couch. The next day she brought him clean secondhand clothes and helped him sip broth until he felt gorged. She hummed when she dressed him and placed a hand on his forehead, giving him pills to wash down with blessedly clean, plentiful water.

“Somebody did a number on you,” she remarked.

John gave vague assent.

“Bastard em-pees, huh?”

It took him a moment to place it. “Military...”

“It's okay,” she whispered. “I'd'a never seen the tattoo if I hadn't...” she gestured toward his clothes in the corner and winked.

He barely remembered falling asleep after that. But he remembered waking up to a warm body climbing on top of him, sliding its hands over his chest.

He tried to whisper _no_ and she shushed him. “I known a couple other men come out of prison,” she said. “Real fun men, after. Had to have it.”

“I didn't--”

“What, isn't _proper_?” She mangled his accent. “You gotta say that. I know you don't mean it.”

He tried to get up the next morning but couldn't stand. He needed her, and she knew it. She salved his wounds badly, accidentally reopened them when she could. He saved his strength until his feet had healed enough to support him, thanked her, said goodbye.

She blocked the door. “You owe me,” she muttered. “Took a lot of trouble on account of you.”

Mercy wasn't a large woman, but she had the ropy muscles of a feral cat, and he could barely walk. She had him on the floor before he knew it, a knife pressed against his neck. “You gonna be grateful?”

He choked a _yes_. She yanked him to his knees and made him lick her off with the knife still digging into his skin. She drew blood when she came.

Mercy brought women to the hotel, smoked cheap tobacco with them with one arm around John. Talked through complicated smuggling plans that he could have told them would never work, if they'd bothered to ask him. They never asked, not even when Mercy let them take him into the bedroom and fuck him _but for christsake don't fuck him up._ He learned to do what they wanted, to read what they didn't say, because if he didn't then Mercy beat what she called sense into him, as if she had ever had to look into the eyes of someone who had exploited her and imagine how they wanted to do it next.

When she looked into his eyes it was a gaze of rapacious pity, of lust mixed with anger at him for provoking it. It was, he realized, a pure distillation of the way that women looked at men.

Did they know what they were doing? It was something he had never put a name to before the emergency, but it was in the women who had shouted at him on the streets back home, the girls at the party. And it was in the women who wrote brutal novels, in the evolutionary social scientists, in the politicians who wanted girls to be girls, in the pornographers who were only giving the people what they wanted.

The horror.

And men had looked at it and found it natural, found it inevitable, found it romantic, found it exciting. They had spilled their pain in titillating confessionals and told the pornographers that they were the people too, and they wanted the same thing: their own degradation. Instead of trying to pull out the knife, they had dug their own fingers into the wound and called it healed, because they got to choose how to hurt themselves. But here at the end of the world – a city of ghouls and psychics – that wound had been ripped open again.

Then had come Dresden.


	8. Dresden's Dolls

Mercy trusted him to leave the hotel by then, if only to pick up women – she knew he had nowhere else to go. But that night, he'd simply gone to one of the desperate nightclubs that had slowly trickled into the cracks left by closed bars and empty restaurants. He bought his own drinks, ignoring the women who talked to him. Until it was late and the dancing dragged on but the last people at the bar were him and a tall woman in an electric blue dress, tapping a straw over her highball glass.

She ignored him until he finally glanced at her, curious. When he accidentally met her eyes, she turned her head like clockwork, a broad smile and teeth too white to be real. She laid the straw methodically on her napkin and stared.

“You look tired,” she told him. “What are you tired of?”

“Life,” he shot back, only half joking.

“There's a cure for that.”

“Trust me, I've had doctors.”

Her cheeks were pocked with acne scars, and her brilliantly veneered teeth still suggested fangs. He should have looked away from her and gone back to his drink. Instead, he'd turned and noted the heavy gold of her watch and earrings, the rich fabric of her loud dress.

“I'm Mona.” She said it like royalty deigning to pass down a favor.

“John.”

She spidered a hand across the table and touched his shoulder. “It's a late night to be out drinking alone, John. Working?”

Was he so obvious?

She had taken him outside and pulled him into her heavy black car, and he knew how the sequence was supposed to go: he got her off politely, she paid him off in anything more useful and discreet than money, he went back and hoped that Mercy would only hurt him a little for making her worry by coming back so late.

But instead he had inhaled the wealth-saturated scent of Mona's car and her dress and caught the hard lines of muscles along her legs, and he had whispered into her ear as he worked his fingers into her: _take me home_. And Mona had smiled and run fingers along his cheekbone.

“You know what they say,” she said, leaning back against the car seat. “You don't pay a man for sex. You pay him to go away.”

“Then don't pay me. I'll do whatever you want.”

“Do you really think money is an issue for me?”

He slid his thumb over her clitoris. “Of course not. You're somebody important, aren't you? But not famous, not buttoned-down. A... smuggling tycoon.”

She laughed. “Try again.”

His joke couldn't have been that off, he knew – he recognized the lazy confidence of real power without social constraints. “Property mogul.”

“That sure doesn't pay, these days...” she trailed into a low moan, thighs tensing.

“Mobster.”

The amused hitch in her breath, before her orgasm, suggested that he had struck a nerve. He let her open his shirt and stroke his skin, as if trying to read a message on it. “Why?” she said. “You need protection?”

Thinking of Mercy, he tried not to flinch. “Maybe.”

She leaned close and looked into his eyes, and for a moment John felt the simultaneous, electrifying jolt of fear and attraction. Then her gaze had dropped down to his bare shoulder, where his tattoo's blurry edges were visible in the sodium glare of the streetlight, above one of the captain's scars. “Tell me.”

And for once he had been grateful to Mercy for teaching him what women wanted.

She had whispered hungry sympathy when he mentioned the Pier, and murmured fury when he put her fingers to his cuts, to the bruises Mercy left on his arms and chest. Straightened her dress when he told her about the hotel and the roaches, when he knew that he had won.

“About time you met a real woman,” she said. “Hell, I can go see the bitch now, if you want.”

“No,” he said, wondering what she might have in the car with her – a tire iron, a gun. “Just take me – take me home.”

For weeks after, he had deluded himself into thinking she had looked at his face and not his scars as she'd said yes.

***

He had learned her surname that night as she drove him up to Inwood with the windows open, cold city air whistling past his ears. Her townhouse looked over the river, out at a country that was closed to him. But when he woke up the next morning, tangled in Dresden's white sheets and dark hair, it was with a sense of freedom.

She took him out to shop for clothing, took him to restaurants that rivaled the quality of food he'd had before Bowling Green. She offered him minutes on a satellite phone to call family in London, although he was too embarrassed to ever do it. She left him hours of freedom while doing work that he knew to never ask her about, offered whatever he wanted, although he found it difficult to want anything. And all he had to do was give her the Pier.

Mona asked for all of it – every beating, every rape, every moment spent shivering in the dark. She never laid a finger on him in anything but affection, but she violated him a thousand times without even touching. She held him when he broke down and stroked his face gently, told him he was safe.

Did she know she was doing it? She was protecting him, but she needed something to protect him from, assurance that he would be lost without her. If she understood that proving it left him in ruins, she simply assumed that existential trauma was a man's natural state.

He couldn't remember when he had not just drunk with her, but _began to drink_ in a systematic and dangerous way. First bottles of Dresden's probably-smuggled upstate wine, then glasses of gin flavored with her hoarded bitters, and finally handles of it straight, reducing the days to soft strokes on a dark canvas.

“Were there other men?” Dresden asked, as they lay in bed. “At the Pier.”

“Yes,” John mumbled. “One, at least.” He wasn't even sure how many people there had ever been there – he'd never seen most of them.

“Did you ever... do anything with them?”

He wondered if Dresden nursed his habit because the alcohol made it harder to keep a story straight if he lied. “Not by choice.”

“What happened?” She drew closer and put an arm around him. “What did they do to you?”

“It was – a couple of the orderlies. One night.” He remembered them shaking him awake and pulling him to his feet, as he swallowed panic at the thought of going to the dead room. But they had only taken him a few meters and pulled the blindfold off in another cell, thrown him to the ground at the feet of a man who looked as drawn and exhausted as he did.

“Got me... on my knees in front of him, asked him if he liked blonds. Asked if he liked Brits.” He had been amused and flattered by how much American women liked his accent when he first got here. They still liked it on the Pier, making him tell them what to do to him when they were drunk.

“Told me to talk,” he said. “Told me to tell him I wanted – wanted his cock in my mouth. Threatened me when I said no, said they'd have a feeding tube down my throat instead.” They had done it once after nearly drowning him, and he'd been too far gone to keep eating. He had coughed blood from his grated throat for days. “So I did it. Tried to get him off, but they kept telling him to stop, to slap me, pull my hair. To stop so they could have a turn.”

Dresden ran her hand over his chest, pulling the sheets around them. John's head spun when he closed his eyes, as if he were observing himself from the outside. It helped him stop his voice from cracking when he spoke.

“Felt like hours, like all night – not that I knew what a night was, or a day. I don't even remember it ending, just waking up back in my own cell. Hurting. But stop me if you've heard that one before,” he spat. Dimly, he hoped she might take offense, which would be at least a sort of respect. He would rather she struck him than held him like this, trailing her mouth down his stomach, as if what he wanted now was pleasure. As if his body's response hadn't humiliated him enough, hadn't confirmed to women that he wanted to be used and hurt even when his voice was begging them to stop. _Real fun men._

He never told Dresden to stop, though. He moaned and let his body take over, and she guided him through their mutual climax, lighting a cigarette after like an old cliché. He refused her offers of them; too many had been put out on his skin, and besides, he had one all-consuming vice now.

He would have loved to have been able to claim he shook the fog out of his head some day and told her he was leaving, like he had failed to do with Mercy. The truth was that she had tired of him. She had taken him downtown and paid a surgeon to stab lidocaine into his shoulder and chop out his tattoo, then presented him with an American driver's license in a new name. Not enough to get him across the border, where he would fail a sensitivity test, but enough to let him walk around the city without fear – or, at least, with a merely ordinary amount of it.

Alone in one of the good suits that Dresden had bought him, he had wandered down the gray streets outside the clinic. He bought a flask of gin, but something in him had changed, and it only made him retch. Screwing the cap back on, he left it balanced on the top of an electrical box and stumbled all the way to Jamie's old offices – for the first time in months, feeling something like human.


	9. The Exorcist

John dialed Jamie on the graffitoed local pay phone outside. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Um – Laurel. The devil. Both.”

“I assumed you'd have taken Laurel back already, no offense. But I'll send her to your house if I see her. The devil has a brownstone.”

Though he had expected something seedy or opulent, the devil (when had he tacitly accepted that as her name?) lived in an undoubtedly once-expensive but dully sensible split-level home. Her boyfriend, from what Jamie had said, met John at the door, tapping erratically on the frame with one finger.

“Good, Mrs. Kinney said you'd be by...” he put out a hand, but John forgot to take it. He was too intent on the familiar static behind the boy.

“Right. She back there then? The de-- your friend.”

“Her name's Leandra. And she's just tired, that's all. It's the stress, lately. The curfews. Happens to all of us.”

John nodded. “Possession? Right, all of us. Can I...” he walked towards the static without asking, suppressing a shudder – the boy looked far too comfortable to be sensitive, that seemed a sure thing. When they reached the door, John hung back and let him twist the knob, avoiding touching anything as he walked inside.

The devil – Leandra – didn't acknowledge their presence. She sat at her desk as if lost in thought, head down and short red hair lank. “You got another notebook?” John asked the boy, who nodded. He handed it to her. “All right,” he said, trying to block out the sensations around her. “Let's sort this out. Can you hear me?”

The woman's hand – her off hand, the boyfriend said – scratched across the page. _Hello, John, she wrote. How are you? How do you do? Well I hope? Bad I fear?_

“Better than your lot in the inferno, I imagine.”

He felt a jag of static shock that he supposed was laughter, though the woman's expression never changed. _Are you so sure?_

“No, I'm not. Why do you think I'm here? I read your damn letter, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. Be happy that hypothetically, some higher power doesn't despise me?”

_I could tell you that, if it would make you feel better. But the truth is, I need you._

“Yeah?” John glanced back at the boy, who retreated without being asked. “You could have told me a bit earlier.”

_I've apologized already. I can do it again. Would you like?_

“Why are you asking me? Shouldn't you already know?”

She was already writing before he finished his words.

_I'm sorry. If it makes you feel better, what we have – it can't last, on its own. But it can change. And you're the one who can do it._

“That's quite dramatic.”

_Hasn't everything in your life been, since you felt Bowling Green? Before it was a twinkle in my eye, even._

“Fuck, fucking hell, was it you who wrote the note in the subway-”

_I had hope for you._

Cold anger coated his veins. “You fucking ruined me! Did you know what would happen? What did you possibly think I could gain?”

_I thought you could repair it. You weren't the only one I asked. But you're the only one who got so close. And the only who I believe would go back to meet me there. It's too late to repair, now. Destruction is inevitable. But salvage is still an option, at the epicenter._

“You've got it wrong, then. I'm not going anywhere for you.”

_I understand. And I'm not like my companion. I wouldn't damn you for refusing – not that I could, anyway. But you ought to go back to the Pier, you know. I think you might find it interesting._

“How would I even know where it is? Not as though they gave me an address.”

She turned the notebook over to him, with a number written and underlined: _57_.

***

Outside Leandra's apartment, John was glad for once to be out under the New York sun, where heat flowed under his skin and there was nothing more supernatural than the honest dead. He nearly forgot to watch the intersections for peacekeepers and keep his eyes down. But the only thing that seemed to notice him was a hunched, dull-furred rat, which slithered into a trash heap as he approached.

When he'd first come to the city, the smell was the first thing he'd learned to hate: the faint, sweet rot of the black pyramids on every sidewalk when it was hot, the dull moldy scent of water pooling in the tops of bags after rain. The occasional rustle of a rat or the murmur of pedestrians walking wide around a plastic-wrapped mattress, its insides scabrous with parasites.

"Did you know they can go eighteen months without a blood meal?" Laurel had asked him the summer before the emergency, when they were eating Chinese takeaway on her floor -- the only bearably cool surface in the flat.

"I do now," he'd answered. "But I didn't particularly want to. I didn't particularly want to learn the phrase 'blood meal,' even."

"You should, though," she told him. "It's part of the scenery. It's what makes us _us_ here."

"Maybe you shouldn't, then. Be you, I mean."

Laurel laughed and then swore as part of a dumpling plunked back into its polystyrene box. She chewed the empty flour wrapping, stabbing up the ball of meat with a single chopstick. "I keep thinking London's got to be more crowded than out here, probably as dirty," she said. "But maybe it's just because everything else in Europe's crowded too. I don't think you get how weird it feels for Americans to live on top of each other like this. And out there, you know -- everybody thinks we're these Godless hedonists, living it easy while they send their girls out to fight wars for us. But me, me -- we -- all know that we're fighting nature herself. You gotta remember that, John. _Nolite bastardes carborundorum._ "

"What's that mean?"

"Don't let the fucking bedbugs grind you down."

John wondered if Laurel had tried to see him while he was out. Normally he wouldn't have expected her to. But she had appeared so suddenly and left so acrimoniously that he couldn't help but want some kind of resolution, and it was up to her -- the one who worked for the Tombs, the one who had tiptoed around the ugly appropriate words for what her colleagues had done to him -- to initiate it. _I heard they hurt you._ He wished he'd thrown it in her face, what they'd done to him, but he knew it wouldn't have done any good. _Hurt_ was all one had to say, about men, because everyone knew how men were hurt.

But here he was, going to relive it for reasons he didn't even understand.

The wide avenues of Chelsea no longer swelled with traffic, in closed New York. The little dive bars and restaurants could still draw a crowd to fill their open-air patios, but it was a different sort of crowd now, too quiet or too loud -- quiet if they were afraid of the peacekeepers and didn't want to attract attention, loud if they were afraid and pretending not to be. John couldn't remember the last time he had been part of either one. He was glad when they faded behind him.

Every block felt like its own city as he passed it, dread growing in his chest. He could stop at any of them, walk back to the subway or catch a cab, return when he'd had time to put things in perspective -- or at least hold tight to the idea of returning. A handful of gray-haired women and a few young men in suits gathered  in the street outside the painted sheet-steel doors of an art studio, smoking cigarettes and speaking in carefully measured cadences. John had never had an eye for art, and he had less of one now, when the only artists left were soft-handed women playing at understanding pain.

Like the restaurants, the artists fell away, but nothing took their place. John stopped and blinked, looking for more buildings to block the sky. All he saw was water, barely visible at the edge of the horizon. He hadn't realized how long it had been since he'd truly been near open space, or that he would feel so exposed when he reached it. Across the river past the guard buoys lay thousands of miles of America, where people were free to drive as far as they wanted, and to imprison sensers on detection. Free to vote a city into perpetual quarantine. But here sun glittered off the Hudson and cabs drew a low and pleasant hum from the asphalt, making their cloistered rounds through Manhattan.

As he reached the highway and waited for the traffic signal, the sun seemed to dim. The mirror surface of the water felt darker, and the cars were no more than things that could kill him. He crossed the street, dodging a cyclist. And stopped short.

The bright colors of a runner streaked past him, but he couldn't focus enough to move out of her way. It was lucky that he hadn't fallen to his knees.

For all his trepidation, he had walked right up to it -- Pier 57 -- without even knowing. Its dull yellow front only gave the number in a clumsily painted placard, but he would have known even without one. The building radiated tragedy, was dark with it, from its brick facade to the cement blocks that floated it out into the Hudson. It even smelled wrong, locked doors padded by cold, stale air. He watched in amazement as the cars and pedestrians passed by. Not knowing. Or not caring. Although even the steadiest runners seemed to speed up as they went by it, tracing an arc away from its perimeter.

The pain was old, smooth, like a river stone. Holding his breath, he approached the in-ramp and stared through its heavy shutters into the darkness. There was nothing there, only a few feet of sheetrock and twisted metal, and a couple of crushed beer cans left by teenagers or vagrants. Then, as he leaned closer, it flickered – like Bowling Green.

John didn't care what the devil had wanted him to see. He nearly ran back across the street, up failing stairs to the High Line overpass, where he could block out the Pier's cold. He raised his hand against the sun and found a chunk of cement, sitting with his back resolutely to the water and his forehead resting on his palms, flicking tears away with his thumbs.

"Do you ever feel like God got you wrong?"

John was far beyond flinching at sudden voices. It was a tall man, he saw when he looked up, a man who grinned at him under tinted glasses and white-blond hair. His fleece-lined jean jacket nearly made John shudder in sympathy. He wasn't sure how the man could bear it in the heat, sealed up like an aviator about to cross the Atlantic – let alone look so calm, hair fluffy and face unflushed. John became even more aware of the sweat on his own face, from heat and panic.

He wished he'd put his head down again, or gotten up and walked off, but once he'd looked, the choice was made -- he couldn't leave now that he'd acknowledged the man's presence. Besides, there was something in the man's heavy gait and the set of his shoulders that made John hesitant to lose sight of him. It had something unnaturally feminine in it, something hard and potentially cruel. It didn't mean he had to reply just yet, though. He would wait, take whatever religious tract was almost certainly waiting in those pockets, and let himself sit in the sun until he burned.

"Have you ever wondered if this world is even where you're meant to be?"

John shook his head, eyes beginning to itch with salt.

The man sat beside him, so close that John could see flecks of gold in his gray eyes. He didn't understand how the skin around those eyes was so clean -- no oil, no dirt, as if he were just some kind of projected image. Then a hand swept around the back of his neck, and this time John did flinch, and try to pull away. There was no heat in that smooth skin; it felt the way John thought corpses must, not cold but empty. But there was something familiar in its touch, and it was strong enough to hold him in place while the man spoke, quieter than before.

"Have you ever met the devil at the crossroads and learned why the world was so cruel to you?"

"Just--" John managed to extricate himself and leaned back. "-- tell me about your cult already, why don't you?"

The man shook his head. "No cults," he said. "But no secrets, either. You know me, don't you?”

He tightened his grip, and for a moment John recognized the embrace of the cold thing in the Pier.

John hesitated. "Yes."

“And you remember what was done to you in our meeting?”

“Yes.”

"And what do you feel, now?"

"I'm – sorry?"

"Did you want more than to," the man gestured at John's face, "to grieve? Did you ever want to take an eye for an eye?"

They both spoke quietly, like feuding lovers.

"Revenge? Of course I, of course sometimes... but I wouldn't give a damn about revenge, if I could just forget it all. If it could just be over.”

"Did you ever imagine yourself as them? On the other side of the prods and the handcuffs? Imagine yourself a _man_.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Not the mewling thing people tell you you're supposed to be. A real man.”

“Those women were monsters.”

"Wouldn't you rather be a predator than prey?"

He shouldn't have looked up, shouldn't have indulged this -- no, this wasn't a man, any more than the devil was an accountant named Leandra. Whatever it was, its gold-flecked eyes seemed to never blink as it stared at John. Like a doll, a puppet whose master operated it only lackadaisically.

“What do you want?” John asked.

“The same thing she does,” the man said. “For you to help her. But she wants you to help her sick little world – thinks it can be done, as stupid as that is. When the time comes, I want you to come find the real one. The one where you are who you're meant to be. Alone.”

“What happens to all this, then?” John looked down the abandoned rail of the High Line, out onto Manhattan.

“Do you care?”

"I'm sorry," said John. "I'd better go."

The thing smiled, and for a moment, the sunlight felt like December. The feeling of intimacy, and the inverse of static, was maddening. Then John turned and did not look back until he was safely in a cab, headed home.


	10. Blink and It's Gone

Laurel was waiting when he got there, and John pointedly didn't ask how she got in. He stood too far away for her to touch him and stared until she dropped her gaze.

"I'm not stalking you," Laurel said. "Promise. Jamie asked me to come."

"Why?"

"Because of all the time I spent _cutting up_ \-- shit, I'm sorry." She shook her head. "I'm sorry. But Jamie told me about going to meet a revenant or something, and she wanted to make sure you'd be safe. Came over. Ran late, though."

“I can tell. Needed time to get your crosses and holy water?”

"That's Catholics. I was Methodist. We didn't do exorcisms."

"Sorry, I can't keep all your bloody sects straight. That the one with the snakes? Or the one running the senser inquisition?"

Laurel didn't laugh, and her eyes wandered across him and the wall behind him. John saw himself as she must: petulant and pitiable, making jokes because he wasn't good for anything else. He had to stop himself from glaring at her for this imagined slight -- though whatever she thought, it hadn't stopped her from making a living feeding flesh into the gristmill of the Tombs.

She didn't respond to his look or his last barb, only hunched her shoulders and focused squarely on the wall. "I'm sorry," she said. "There isn't anything I can say to defend it. But -- you'd disappeared. Everybody else was disappearing, too. It wouldn't have been rational to hold out.”

“Well, this isn't rationality's day,” John said. “I think I just saw God.”

He told her half hoping that she would laugh at him and bring him back to reality. But she frowned deeply when he described the notebook and the Pier and the ritual, as if trying to remember something.

“They never told me anything,” she said. “But that – well, I'll believe it. I've seen... things, John. Ethereal shit. Apocalypse talk. She's gotta be wrong, you know.”

“Who?”

“Your – devil, about repair not being an option. The Pier, they were on the right track, I bet – as terrible as it was,” she added quickly and, John thought, a little half-heartedly.

“Why should she be?”

"Because -- can you even imagine what that means? To just wink out? If that's what the end of the world looks like? All of us, gone? Never been? What is it?"

"Maybe we wake up in the mirror universe," John said. "And it was all just a bad dream. Bad for me, anyway., not..." he couldn't quite wish his pain on her. Or maybe it just sounded so empty to threaten her with some imaginary patriarchy. Would they have liked each other if their roles were reversed? Would they even be recognizable to each other? What would Laurel look like with her easy braggadacio tempered by fear? What would he be like without it?

“You're talking like there's some... chasm between us, like your life'd have been perfect if things were reversed. I could have been the one they took to... you know. More women come to the Tombs than men.”

“At least they had something different to escape to, if they got out.”

“When did I ever treat you like that, John? When did I ever act like one of them?” Laurel's voice was rising, wounded.

“When did you ever give a damn about what they did?” he shouted. “Not until it happened to someone you were fucking?”

“You want to hold me responsible for what every woman's ever done badly, fine! But this is our world. Our home. You'd destroy everything we've ever had, just to settle scores?”

_Yes_ , he started to shout, but it died in his throat. "No," he said finally. "It's not what any of us want. But I'm not going back to your butchers.”

“I'm not asking! We just need time. Need time to figure this out,” Laurel said, with the tone of someone trying to salvage a burned meal. “Stall. Just stall. You can do that, can't you?”

“I suppose I'll see.”

***

Laurel left him to think. It could all be fiction, he supposed. Leandra could be an inventive liar, the man's effect – and the flickering building – a product of his suggestible imagination. But every time he followed that thread, he knew it wasn't true. Whatever this was, he was willing to play through the end, if only it would give him something to think about besides the lockdown and the dingy apartment and --

The door buzzed. And the peacekeepers.

John felt lightheaded, trying not to give in to his sense of self-preservation. He went back to his couch. She wouldn't do something as final as call in a raid, he thought. He might suffer for it later, but he would at least get a day of peace.

He tried to concentrate, but every noise from outside startled him – the cars, the sound of a door creaking across the hall. The boots up the stairs. The knock on the door.

It must be the supervisor, he thought. She had let the peacekeeper in – _just to check_ – and if he didn't come to the door, she would open it for him. He let her, keeping his head down, pretending to be concentrating so hard on a book he'd picked at random that he couldn't hear the peacekeeper approaching. Not until she put a hand around his neck and squeezed. “Tired?”

He didn't answer. He was tired, too tired to even be as afraid as he knew he ought to be. Until she grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him onto the floor, kicked his ribs when he tried to stand, kicked them again when he tried to crawl away. On his stomach, he felt her on top of him, slipping her hands under his shirt and around his neck. Something was broken, he thought – sudden delirious image of his chest caved in like a skeleton's. Sudden thought, irrational, of how much further along she would have been if he'd let her in, how much sooner she might have left. He closed his eyes and counted seconds as she tore the collar open, running her hands along his shoulders. The pressure lifted, and she rolled him over to look at her.

“Undress,” she said.

When he hesitated, she rested her weight on him until he winced, tried to stay silent. The clock in his head was still counting up, and he wanted to be alone. Trembling, he pulled off his clothes. She touched him, violated him, slid onto him, slapped him when he tried to look away from her. The clock ran. It would be over soon, he told himself. It would be over when she got off, stood up, rested a foot on his wrist, lightly. Warning. She looked down at him – _stay right there_ – and turned to the counter, looking for a glass. John began to let himself relax.

And then she had turned, neatly, and was holding something down for him to see. Laurel's hair clip, the one he'd taken out last night.  
“Didn't know I was sharing you.”

John's body was heavy and his chest was tight. He could have come up with a convincing lie, maybe. But he suspected that what he said didn't matter, that all she wanted was to watch him plead. He let the weariness overcome him again, keeping him silent.

The peacekeeper knelt, pushing a knee into his chest and pinning him to the ground. The glass smashed, and she pressed a sharp edge into his palm, drawing it downward until blood dripped off his fingers. John managed to twist away, but he didn't make it to the door. She pushed him to the bedroom and pulled down one of his flimsy blinds, breaking out the rod that held it. John managed not to show how much it hurt when she whipped it into his chest, but it threw him off enough that she could knock him down and grab one of his ties, binding him to the bedpost with it.

The peacekeeper ran the tip of the rod across his cheek, edges sharp where the caster had fallen off at the end. It slid over his lower lip, tearing skin. She pushed and he parted his teeth, let her slide it in, tasting the cheap plated steel and the salt of his blood. “What was her name?”

He tried to swallow around the metal and choked. “Laur – Laura,” he said, coughing, when she removed it. The pointless lie was still, somehow, satisfying.

“You ever let her tie you up here?”

He shook his head.

“I bet you wanted her to, though.” The rod came down hard into his stomach, twice, three times. He closed his eyes and fought sickness. She put a hand under his chin, lifted his face toward her, and grinned viciously. "Think I might have a drink," she said. "We've got a lot to do this evening."

She closed the bedroom door behind her.

John waited, knees aching on the floor. He heard the clink of ice, and then her hum, a tuneless rendition of a summer billboard hit. He waited. She showed no sign of returning, and he tested the tie binding his wrists. He pulled until his skin was pinched and his fingers were beginning to lose feeling, but it only made the knots tighter.

He heard the sound of books thudding on his milk-crate shelf, and waited. A loose screw on the bed had caught the tie fabric slightly, and he rubbed his wrists over it, listening carefully for any sign that she was coming back. The wound on his hand reopened, and blood dampened his palms as he worked. 

He thought, briefly and stupidly, about calling for help. But the doorknob creaked, startling him badly enough that he hit his head on the bedpost. The peacekeeper laughed.

"You really are cute," she said. "Shame it turned out like this."

She ruffled his hair. John started to struggle, but then his eyes went to her other hand, the one weighing a Guard-issue knife casually between thumb and forefinger. She sliced a strip from his sheets and rolled it up, never quite holding the blade against John's throat as she gagged him.

"You wouldn't tell anybody about this, would you?"

John shook his head, wondering if the fabric around his wrists had given slightly, or if it was only his imagination. Hopefully it wouldn't matter soon – maybe she would cut him free, or she would just leave, and he would swallow his pride and try to call for help.

"That's good to hear." This time, she did press the knife down. It nicked the skin of his neck, burning like an insect bite. "Not that it matters."

He tried to swallow behind the gag. "For such a shitty apartment, your walls are pretty thick," she said conversationally. The knife chewed another millimeter into his flesh, and he tugged at his bindings, praying for them to loosen. "How long should I try to keep you screaming... before someone notices?"

This script, he knew, and so did she. It had been invented long ago by crueler women, like the wheel or the programmable computer. Sadism was only a technology.

Still, he would have begged if she had let him. He would have begged as she drew thin red lines down one shoulder, even as he felt the tie around his wrists fray. Or as he pulled them free and grabbed for the knife, hands stinging, bleeding. Or as the script failed and something gave in the peacekeeper's throat, and she tried to curse him but all that came out was blood. He took out the gag and did beg, then. He begged her to stay alive, knowing how much worse he would have it if he killed her.

But it was too late.


	11. Emergency

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _So let us go then, you and I, through certain half-deserted streets. To the long home, to be the mourners about the skyscrapers. Let us go to bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing. We're all alone here, John. We have always been here, and always alone._

By the time John cleaned the blood off himself, the blind panic had receded, and his body was no longer responding purely on reflex. He wrapped a strip of sheet around his injured hand and put on a high-collared, long-sleeved shirt to hide the rest of the marks. The peacekeeper was pushed under the bed – no final hiding place, especially in summer, but enough to avoid alerting a casual visitor not attuned to the tang of blood or the psychic sensation of death.

He made his way down the steps with difficulty, sweat already stinging the skin around his collar. For a moment he thought he saw part of the wall disappear in the corner of his eye, but by the time he looked it was back in place, as spiderwebbed and dust-smeared as always.

John wished that he could disappear as well, as he drifted the three blocks to the subway. In the wake of Bowling Green, New Yorkers had developed a tacit fascination with each other. At first John had taken it for mutual surveillance, since only in New York – the hair-trigger arrests and the Tombs notwithstanding – were sensers given such freedom of motion. But he had grudgingly realized that while he might worry about the peacekeepers or the visitors, the city's remaining residents had adopted his maligned tribe as their own. They saw each other as fellow players in an ensemble cast – of a million characters seeking an exit, they were the only ones left, each with a story of why they stayed. They scanned fellow pedestrians slantways and gazed into each other's windows like television sets, trying to divine their dramatic motivation. But John was seeking an author now, and he didn't want to feel their pity or their tragedy.

He kept his head down and slid a token into the turnstile gently, as though its silence would make a difference. The buoyancy of adrenalin had drained, and all he wanted was to fall asleep there on the train. If only he could wake up a year earlier with that note in his hand, and leave it crumpled on the platform. There was no more time for the luxury of self-recrimination, he told himself. It would be difficult enough finding a way into the block clear-headed.

Clear-headed – that was wishful thinking, he realized, as he neared the first barricade. It was all wrong. He was blocks away from the epicenter, and already a hint of glass knives pressed against his skin. He doubted other pedestrians could feel it, but even they were all walking away from the block, calmly and perhaps inadvertently. Then he saw a peacekeeper strolling among them, and he knew that he was not imagining it: something was wrong.

They had deserted the first barrier, it seemed. John walked its perimeter looking for an opening, wondering at how the wall had stayed so clean. Nothing should be so sacred or so ominous as to repel the thin plating of stickers and flyers and memorial pages that flat surfaces demanded. Even the peacekeepers, who thought nothing of defacing their temporary home, had left it be.

The gap he had used a year ago was gone, and he wasn't sure he'd find another. It was difficult to think like this, bleeding and exhausted with the landscape buzzing in his head. Something... something had to be around... He banged his fist against the wall, hoping to distract himself with minor pain. His hand went two inches into the concrete.

Startled, he yanked it out, the sensation like drawing a limb from electrified quicksand. Even in his abortive journey to the epicenter, he had never touched the Bowling Green Block, never felt its static cling to the skin between his fingers. And now he wasn't even inside it. How much worse would it be once he was?

He couldn't think about that, because there was no going back. Someone would find the peacekeeper, and the island wasn't big enough for him to hide forever, and even if he got out of the city, it was only a matter of time before someone discovered his cryptosensitivity. Besides... if this feeling was spreading outside the Block, who knew how far it could go? Holding his breath, he stepped into the wall.

It might stick halfway, he thought. Trap him like a figure on a living frieze. But there was the other side, the deserted buffer street with its hastily denuded storefronts. Some still bore dark argon signs, others mannequins with styles long outdated; their owners had been either too afraid to return, or had been caught in the Block itself. Office towers that once never closed huddled behind metal barricades, as though put up for safekeeping against a homecoming that never came.

John wandered the deserted street, gritting his teeth against the building discomfort of the Block. No sinkhole, no bombing could have driven people so completely from a place like this. But the psychic fallout had salted the earth, creating a place even squatters were desperate to leave. The ordinary wear of traffic had not touched these streets, the way it had the now-perpetually unkempt pavement outside. It was a New York strangely closer to the one he had arrived in, never mind the fact that that city was dead. More than dead, he supposed now – it should never have existed in the first place.

“Don't say that. I've never regretted creating it.”

John started, heart pounding. A woman stood on the other side of the street, surveying him over the top of an old newspaper. Nothing was out of the ordinary about her, but he could not have given her age if someone had asked, nor her height, nor the color of her skin. She smiled lopsidedly and crumpled the paper between momentarily blurry hands, tossing it into the air. A nonexistent breeze caught and carried it, the same one that flirted with the skirt of her long black shift. John shook his head and gestured toward outside, praying the peacekeepers weren't within earshot.

“They can't hear us.” Her low voice carried as though she were next to him, resonating in his bones. It soothed the block's hideous magnetism, let his heartbeat drop to something nearly normal. “So let us go then, you and I, through certain half-deserted streets. To the long home, to be the mourners about the skyscrapers. Let us go to bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing. We're all alone here, John. We have always been here, and always alone. From my perspective, anyway.”

“That's lovely. I don't care,” said John, recovering his voice. “And I won't help you. I won't help you save this place. It doesn't deserve it.”

The woman nodded and turned on her heel, leaving John no choice but to follow her. “And what would you do instead?” she asked, the words as clear as before.

John laughed bitterly. “The will of God.”

“So you did find him. Will you do what he says? Slip lonely into the real world, like the sole survivor of a sinking ship? Look not for ten righteous men in Sodom – or women, perhaps?”

“If the alternative is crawling back into a prison cell like a good boy, then yes.”

She had taken him to the second barricade, not even bothering to make a show of stepping through it before she disappeared. He could nearly taste the cement this time as he crossed. She blinked back a moment after he opened his eyes, setting their pace again.

“It isn't,” she said, after a long silence.

“Then what is it?” John demanded, forgetting for a moment his apprehension.

The woman turned the corner, footsteps somehow audible even in the New York daytime. It was though the city had been reversed, and nothing existed outside the barricades. John rounded behind her, and the Bowling Green park spread open in front of him, a wedge of hot cement and haggard grass. Breath thick with its peculiar static, he followed her to the glass subway awning in its center, so clean it was nearly invisible. He should not, he knew, have been able to breathe at all here. He should not have been able to even stand.

“Come down with me,” she said. She took the first step down its stairway and vanished.

For a moment, the quivering air was back in full force, choking him. Then it retreated, as though someone had closed a door – or maybe, patched a gap. The sounds of the city – a city, anyway – had returned: the hum of cars and clang of construction, fragments of conversation from pedestrians he couldn't see. A crowd of shadows trudged the stairs, pouring out of the station as spectral light reflected off its Terra-cotta tiles. It was like the ghost of a world where the emergency had never happened, and the trains still clattered through the tip of Manhattan and under the river, out to the veritable foreign country of Brooklyn.

As he rushed down the stairs, his peripheral vision sometimes caught a glimpse of a face, a hat, a pair of glasses. They were always gone when he turned his head, but not before he could feel the female ones more timid, the men more bold. John thought of the cold man in his jacket. Wondered if he was still wandering the High Line. The walls were no longer tile now. John could not have said what they were.  
He did not look at the not-tiles as he caught the solid black of a skirt and took the last stairwell. He did not look at his feet, in case the surface they walked on was no longer cement. He focused only on the shadows.

The woman – the devil – stood at the edge of the platform, arms crossed. She could not have been human, but unlike the cold man or Leandra, there was no sense of the puppet about her. Whatever sort of thing she was, it was itself.

“You asked about choices, so let me lay them out,” she said, as the silence descended again. “The status quo – that is no longer an option, if it ever was. Even if I could put things back... you couldn't understand how tired I am of it, of all this. Can you imagine what it's like to have become the god of a place you hate more and more every day, that you are convinced you only created out of spite and desperation? To be tied to an idea that you could never get right, no matter how hard you tried?”

_Obviously not_ , John was about to retort. But he _could_ sense it, like an emotion from a dream. A feeling that enveloped everything he was, consumed everything he ever would be. That slipped into the cracks of his being, caulking up all the empty places where he might have changed.

“Creation – it's a monstrous thing, John. And bad enough when you can see the promise of improvement, dream of utopia. A world is nothing if you can't hope for impossible perfection. Can he dream of the world I wish I could imagine, sometimes? He must be able to, which makes it all the more painful. But I...” she looked around, as if she'd forgotten what she wanted to say. “Where was I?”

“Not an option,” John said, as the feeling disappeared and the hint of a ghost-man brushed through his wounded hand. It seemed only fair that his injuries should have disappeared here, but the cuts and bruises still throbbed, and his voice was hoarse when he spoke.

“Yes. Whatever I want, he has taken away that option. Can't you feel it, the disintegration here? Spreading, thinning. The last of my strength is keeping it together.”

“So what happens?”

“He told you one option, when I sent you to find him – not that he knew that's what I was doing. You can escape the sinking ship, if you want to. Walk back up those stairs and let the world blink out behind you. Sleep, and wake as your other self – man, dreaming of butterfly.”

“Am I – what happened to me, in that world? Are you sure I'm even alive? In New York?”

“Wherever you are, you'll find you – create yourself again, if need be. Anything else,” she said heavily, “is in the hands of God. He might tell you about it, if you asked.” Her voice didn't hint at whether the suggestion was supposed to be mocking.

“Anyway, what if I don't? Don't leave?”

“You can drift out with the rest, I suppose. Trust that whatever version of you exists will do better without your memories. Who knows – you might not get along with yourself, anyway.”

“And that's all?”

“Would I have bothered making such a production out of this, if it were? No. The third way – the ship is still sinking, but you could free a lifeboat.”

All his rage had slipped away at the moment he needed it most. He had been ready to give them all up: vampiric Dresden, careless Laurel, all the people whose safety – for once – was in his hands. Now all he could think about was the fact that he would never see them again, not in this world. He hadn't even gotten to say goodbye. Laurel's fear no longer seemed selfish; if it were possible, he realized, he would cling to his last days here until his fingers bled.

The woman never touched him, but her presence enveloped him like an embrace. “I'm sorry, John,” she said. “You all deserve a better class of deity – all of you, both sides of the divide.”

He laughed, despite himself. “At least I can say I've gotten an apology from a god – or could, if there were anyone to tell.”

“No god, John. Just a lonely devil at the end of the world.”

His eyes were damp now, and he made no attempt to wipe them dry. “A lifeboat – what did you mean?”

“When he lets you into his world, I could help you keep the gate open. Turn his world into a place where everyone understands what it's like to be both predator and prey, the thing I was trying so hard to convey at Bowling Green. Maybe, what neither he nor I could accomplish alone, we can accidentally create together.”

The last syllable of her speech was smothered by the scratch of brakes on rail – a train, setting her against a backdrop of silver-gray ridges. He heard the familiar two-tone ding, and the doors slid away, rows of empty seats gleaming behind them.

“I wouldn't blame you for walking away, John. But if you want a way out for everyone, I can make it happen. All you need to do is get on board.”

“How can I know any of this will work?” he asked. “How do I know this isn't another Bowling Green? How do I know I can't just walk outside and pick my life up again?” Pick it back up, with his broken body and the dead peacekeeper under his bed.

“Because you _do_ know, John.” She deftly crossed the gap, holding the door for him with one flickering arm. “Are you coming?”

He looked back at the stairs, their static edges no longer as sharp as they had seemed just minutes ago. Out that way might be revenge, the cold man's cruel paradise – his chance to reign in heaven after serving in hell.

He turned his back and stepped onto the train, bracing himself for motion as the doors closed. The devil, or whatever she was, gave something like a smile.

_This is a Brooklyn-bound Five express train,_ called a smooth, staid voice from somewhere very far away. _The next stop is: Borough Hall._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be the strangest, most difficult thing I'll post here, and I've spent far too much time on it between other stories. It's not my favorite novella, or probably my best, but it's the one I feel most strongly about.
> 
> _Diary of the Devil_ is built on one question: what would it look like to write a fictional matriarchy equivalent to fictional, non-sci-fi or fantasy patriarchies? Not whips-and-leather kink or single-gender worlds or cutesy "what if men wore makeup and couldn't have jobs," but a story about the day-to-day predation of your average 20th-century American novel, flipped to have men, instead of women, as the world's designated victims?
> 
> I can't even really shape that world in my head, which is why whenever I screw up, I can at least just say the devil did it, here. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone write something quite like this, and although maybe there's a reason for that, now I can at least know that it exists. So, thank you for reading a very long fever dream about a world-weary psychic living out a gender-swapped Andrea Dworkin novel in an alternate Manhattan created by the devil.


End file.
